Java
The Garden of the East

MALAYS DIVING FOR MONEY.

Java

The Garden of the East

By
Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore
Author of “Jinrikisha Days in Japan”

New York
The Century Co.
1898

Copyright, 1897,
By The Century Co.

The DeVinne Press

PREFACE

In presenting this account of a visit to one of the most beautiful countries of the world, I shall hope that many will be induced to follow there, and that my record may assist them to avoid certain things and to take advantage of others that will add to their enjoyment of the island where nature has been so prodigal with beauties and wonders.

After the body of this work had gone to press, the first copies of a small, compact, and most admirable “Guide to the Dutch East Indies,” written by Dr. J. F. Van Bemmelen and Colonel J. B. Hoover, by invitation of the Royal Steam Packet Company, Amsterdam, and translated into English by the Rev. B. J. Berrington, reached this country, and to this work I hasten to extend my salutations, since my own pages contain so many plaints for some such guide. It treats of all the islands under Dutch rule, turning especial light upon the so little-known Sumatra, where many attractions and possible resorts will invite pleasure-travel; and, leading one from end to end of Java, it more than supplements what Captain Schulze’s little guide had done for Batavia and the west end of the island. Translating so much of local and special lore hitherto locked away from the alien visitor in Dutch texts, it at last fairly opens Java to the tourist world, and excites my keen regret that its earlier publication had not lighted my way.

In preparing these pages every effort has been made to avoid errors, and I invite other corrections, and acknowledge here with great appreciation those suggested by Dutch readers, and at once made in certain chapters that originally appeared in the “Century Magazine.” In the varied English, French, and Dutch spelling of many words, in drawing statistics from works in as many languages, and in accepting as facts things verbally communicated to me by seemingly responsible people, there were chances of error; but one can only beg to be set right. In this connection I hasten to state that under the liberal policy of recent years the Dutch government has withdrawn its prohibition of the pilgrimage to Mecca, and more than six thousand of its Mohammedan subjects have availed themselves of the privilege in one year. It should also be noted that the Ashantee prince has not availed himself of the privilege of living and dying under the British flag in South Africa, and the pathetic tale of that exile, as told by Britons, lacks that completing touch of fact. For these suggestions in particular, others concerning Sumatra, and still others which had been anticipated, I thank Mr. R. A. Van Sandick of Amsterdam, with appreciation of the spirit and the loyalty to his own people which prompted his making them. Myths and legends and fairy tales grow with tropic rankness in those far ends of earth even to-day, and gravitate inevitably to the stranger’s ear.

E. R. S.

Washington, D. C., October 1, 1897.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

JAVA
THE GARDEN OF THE EAST

I
SINGAPORE AND THE EQUATOR

Singapore (or S’pore, as the languid, perspiring, exhausted residents near the line most often write and pronounce the name of Sir Stamford Raffles’s colony in the Straits of Malacca) is a geographical and commercial center and cross-roads of the eastern hemisphere, like to no other port in the world. Singapore is an ethnological center, too, and that small island swinging off the tip of the Malay Peninsula holds a whole congress of nations, an exhibit of all the races and peoples and types of men in the world, compared to which the Midway Plaisance was a mere skeleton of a suggestion. The traveler, despite the overpowering, all-subduing influence of the heat, has some thrills of excitement at the tropical pictures of the shore, and the congregation of varicolored humanity grouped on the Singapore wharf; and there and in Java, where one least and last expects to find such modern conveniences, his ship swings up to solid wharves, and he walks down a gang-plank in civilized fashion—something to be appreciated after the excitements and discomforts of landing in small boats among the screaming heathen of all other Asiatic ports.

On the Singapore wharf is a market of models and a life-class for a hundred painters; and sculptors, too, may study there all the tones of living bronze and the beauties of human patina, and more of repose than of muscular action, perhaps. Japanese, Chinese, Siamese, Malays, Javanese, Burmese, Cingalese, Tamils, Sikhs, Parsees, Lascars, Malabars, Malagasy, and sailor folk of all coasts, Hindus and heathens of every caste and persuasion, are grouped in a brilliant confusion of red, white, brown, and patterned drapery, of black, brown, and yellow skins; and behind them, in ghostly clothes, stand the pallid Europeans, who have brought the law, order, and system, the customs, habits, comforts, and luxuries of civilization to the tropics and the jungle. All these alien heathens and picturesque unbelievers, these pagans and idolaters, Buddhists, Brahmans, Jews, Turks, sun- and fire-worshipers, devil-dancers, and what not, have come with the white man to toil for him under the equatorial sun, since the Malays are the great leisure class of the world, and will not work. The Malays will hardly live on the land, much less cultivate it or pay taxes, while they can float about in strange little hen-coops of house-boats that fill the river and shores by thousands. Hence the Tamils have come from India to work, and the Chinese to do the small trading; and the Malay rests, or at most goes a-fishing, or sits by the canoe-loads of coral and sponges, balloon-fish and strange sea treasures that are sold at the wharf.

A tribe of young Malays in dugout canoes meet every steamer and paddle in beside it, shrieking and gesticulating for the passengers to toss coins into the water. Their mops of black hair are bleached auburn by the action of sun and salt water, and the canoe and paddle fit as naturally to these amphibians as a turtle’s shell and flipper. They bail with an automatic sweep of the hollowed foot in regular time with the dip of the paddle; and when a coin drops, the Malay lets go the paddle and sheds his canoe without concern. There is a flash of brown heels, bubbles and commotion below, and the diver comes up, and chooses and rights his wooden shell and flipper as easily and naturally as a man picks out and assumes his coat and cane at a hall door. And in their hearts, the civilized folk on deck, hampered with their multiple garments and conventions, envy these happy-go-lucky, care-free amphibians in the land of the breadfruit, banana, and scant raiment, with dives into the cool, green water, teeming with fish and glittering with falling coins, as the only exertion required to earn a living. Cold and hunger are unknown; flannels and soup are no part of charity; and even that word, and the many organizations in its name, are hardly known in the lands low on the line.

S’pore is the great junction where travelers from the East or the West change ship for Java; a commercial cross-roads where all who travel must stop and see what a marvel of a place British energy has raised from the jungle in less than half a century. The Straits Settlements date from the time when Sir Stamford Raffles, after Great Britain’s five years’ temporary occupancy of Java, returned that possession to the Dutch in 1816, the fall of Napoleon removing the fear that this possession of Holland would become a French colony and menace to British interests in Asia. It had been intended to establish such a British commercial entrepôt at Achin Head, the north end of Sumatra; but Sir Stamford Raffles’s better idea prevailed, and the free port of Singapore in the Straits of Malacca has won the commercial supremacy of the East from Batavia, and has prospered beyond its founder’s dreams. It is a well-built and a beautifully ordered city, and the municipal housekeeping is an example to many cities of the temperate zone. Even the untidy Malay and the dirt-loving Chinese, who swarm to this profitable trading-center, and have absorbed all the small business and retail trade of the place, are held to outer cleanliness and strict sanitary laws in their allotted quarters. The stately business houses, the marble palace of a bank, the long iron pavilions shading the daily markets, the splendid Raffles Museum and Library, are all regular and satisfactory sights; but the street life is the fascination and distraction of the traveler before everything else. The array of turbans and sarongs gives color to every thoroughfare; but the striking and most unique pictures in Singapore streets are the Tamil bullock-drivers, who, sooty and statuesque, stand in splendid contrast between their humped white oxen and the mounds of white flour-bags they draw in primitive carts. Tiny Tamil children, shades blacker, if that could really be, than their ebon- and charcoal-skinned parents, are seen on suburban roads, clothed only in silver chains, bracelets, and medals; and these lithe, lean people from the south end of India are first in the picturesque elements of the great city of the Straits. The Botanical Garden, although so recently established, promises to become famous; and one arriving from the farther East meets there for the first time the beautiful red-stemmed Banka palm, and the symmetrical traveler’s palm of Madagascar, the latter all conventionalized ready for sculptors’ use. Scores of other splendid palms, giant creepers, gorgeous blossoms and fantastic orchids, known to us only by puny examples in great conservatories at home, equally delight one—all the wealth of jungle and swamp growing beside the smooth, hard roads of an English park, over which one may drive for hours in the suburbs of Singapore.

A STREET IN SINGAPORE.

After photograph by E. S. Platt.

The Dutch mail-steamers to and from Batavia connect with the English mail-steamers at Singapore; a French line connects with the Messagerie’s ships running between Marseilles and Japan; an Australian line of steamers gives regular communication; and independent steamers, offering as much comfort, leave Singapore almost daily for Batavia. The five hundred miles’ distance is covered in forty-eight or sixty hours, for a uniform fare of fifty Mexican dollars or ninety Dutch gulden—an excessive and unusual charge for a voyage of such length in that or any other region. The traveler is usually warned long beforehand that living and travel in the Netherlands Indies is the most expensive in the world; and the change from the depreciated Mexican silver-dollar standard and the profitable exchange of the far East to the gold standard of Holland dismays one at the start. The completion of railways across and to all parts of the island of Java, however, has greatly reduced tourist expenses, so that they are not now two or three times the average of similar expenses in India, China, and Japan.

At Singapore, only two degrees above the equator, the sun pursues a monotony of rising and setting that ranges only from six minutes before to six minutes after six o’clock, morning and evening, the year round. Breakfasting by candle-light and leaving the hotel in darkness, there was all the beauty of the gray-and-rose dawn and the pale-yellow rays of the early sun to be seen from the wet deck when our ship let go from the wharf and sailed out over a sea of gold. For the two days and two nights of the voyage, with but six passengers on the large blue-funnel steamer, we had the deck and the cabins, and indeed the equator and the Java Sea, to ourselves. The deck was furnished with the long chairs and hammocks of tropical life, but more tropical yet were the bunches of bananas hanging from the awning-rail, that all might pick and eat at will; for this is the true region of plenty, where selected bananas cost one Mexican cent the dozen, and a whole bunch but five cents, and where actual living is far too cheap and simple to be called a science.

The ship slipped out from the harbor through the glassy river of the Straits of Malacca, and on past points and shores that to me had never been anything but geographic names. There was some little thrill of excitement in being “on the line” in the heart of the tropics, the half-way house of all the world, and one expected strange aspects and effects. There was a magic stillness of air and sea; the calm was as of enchantment, and one felt as if in some hypnotic trance, with all nature chained in the same spell. The pale, pearly sky was reflected in smooth stretches of liquid, pearly sea, with vaporous hills, soft green visions of land beyond. Everywhere in these regions the shallow water shows pale green above the sandy bottom, and the anchor can be dropped at will. All through the breathless day the ship coursed over this shimmering yellow and gray-green sea, with faint pictures of land, the very landscapes of mirage, drawn in vaporous tints on every side. We were threading a way through the thousand islands, the archipelago lying below the point of the Malay Peninsula, a region of unnamed, uncounted “summer isles of Eden,” chiefly known to history as the home of pirates.

The high mountain-ridges of Sumatra barred the west for all the first equatorial day, the land of this “Java Minor” sloping down and spreading out in great green plains and swamps on the fertile but unhealthy eastern coast. The large settlements and most attractive districts are on the west coast, where the hills rise steeply from the ocean, and coffee-trees thrive luxuriantly. Benkoelen, the old English town, and Padang, the great coffee-mart, are on that coast, and from the latter a railway leads to high mountain districts of great picturesqueness. There are few government plantations on Sumatra, where land-tenures and leases are the same as in Java. Immense areas have been devoted to tobacco-culture near Deli, on the north or Straits coast, planters employing there and on lower east-coast estates more than forty-three thousand Chinese coolies—the Chinese, the one Asiatic who toils with ardor and regularity, whom the tropics cannot debilitate, and to whom malaria and all germs, microbes, and bacilli seem but tonic agents.

When the British returned Java, after the Napoleon scare was over, they retained Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope, and sovereign rights over Sumatra, relinquishing this latter suzerainty in 1872, in exchange for Holland’s imaginary rights in Ashantee and the Gold Coast of Africa. The Dutch then attempted to reduce the native population of Sumatra to the same estate as the more pliant people of Java; but the wild mountaineers and bucaneers, of the north, or Achin, end of the island in particular, warned by the sad fate of the Javanese, had no intention of being conquered and enslaved, of giving their labor and the fruit of their lands to the strangers from Europe’s cold swamps. The Achin war has continued since 1872, with little result save a general loss of Dutch prestige in the East, an immense expenditure of Dutch gulden, causing a deficit in the colonial budget every year, a fearful mortality among Dutch troops, and the final abandonment, in this decade of trade depression, of the aggressive policy. Dutch commanders are well satisfied to hold their chain of forts along the western hills, and to punish the Achinese in a small way by blockading them from their supplies of opium, tobacco, and spirits. In one four years of active campaigning the Achin war cost seventy million gulden, and seventy out of every hundred Dutch soldiers succumbed to the climate before going into an encounter. The Achinese merely retired to their swamps and jungles and waited, and the climate did the rest, their confidence in themselves only shaken during the command of General Van der Heyden, who for a time actually crushed the rebellion. This picturesque fighter, a half-brother of Baron de Stuers, inherited Malay instincts from a native mother, and carried on such a warfare as the Achinese understood. He lost an eye in one encounter, and the natives, then remembering an old tradition that their country would be conquered by a one-eyed man, practically gave up the struggle—to resume it, however, as soon as General Van der Heyden retired and sailed for Holland, and military vigilance was relaxed in consequence of Dutch economy. The Achinese leader, Toekoe Oemar, has several times apparently yielded to the Dutch, only to perpetrate some greater injury; and his treachery and crimes have given him repute as the very prince of evil ones.

One’s sympathy goes naturally with the brave, liberty-loving Achinese; and in view of their indomitable spirit, Great Britain did not lose so much when she let go unconquerable Sumatra. British tourists are saddened, however, when they see what their ministers let slip with Java, for with that island and Sumatra, all Asia’s southern shore-line, and virtually the far East, would have been England’s own.

Geologically this whole Malay Archipelago was one with the Malay Peninsula, and although so recently made, is still subject to earthquake change, as shown in the terrible eruption of the island of Krakatau in the narrow Sunda Strait, west of Java, in August, 1883. Native traditions tell that anciently Sumatra, Java, Bali, and Sumbawa were one island, and “when three thousand rainy seasons shall have passed away they will be reunited”; but Alfred Russel Wallace denies it, and proves that Java was the first to drop away from the Asiatic mainland and become an island.

While the sun rode high in the cloudless white zenith above our ship the whole world seemed aswoon. Hills and islands swam and wavered in the heat and mists, and the glare and silence were terrible and oppressive. One could not shake off the sensation of mystery and unreality, of sailing into some unknown, eerie, other world. Every voice was subdued, the beat of the engines was scarcely felt in that glassy calm, and the stillness of the ship gave a strange sensation, as of a magic spell. It was not so very hot,—only 86° by the thermometer,—but the least exertion, to cross the deck, to lift a book, to pull a banana, left one limp and exhausted, with cheeks burning and the breath coming faster, that insidious, deceptive heat of the tropics declaring itself—that steaming, wilting quality in the sun of Asia that so soon makes jelly of the white man’s brain, and that in no way compares with the scorching, dry 96° in the shade of a North American, hot-wave summer day.

At five o’clock, while afternoon tea and bananas were being served on deck, we crossed the line—that imaginary parting of the world, the invisible thread of the universe, the beginning and the end of all latitude—latitude 0°, longitude 103° east, the sextant told. The position was geographically exciting. We were literally “down South,” and might now speak disrespectfully of the equator if we wished. A breeze sprang up as soon as we crossed the line, and all that evening and through the night the air of the southern hemisphere was appreciably cooler. The ship went slowly, and loitered along in order to enter the Banka Straits by daylight; and at sunrise we were in a smooth river of pearl, with the green Sumatra shores close on one hand, and the heights of Banka’s island of tin on the other. A ship in full sail swept out to meet us, and four more barks under swelling canvas passed by in that narrow strait, whose rocks and reefs are fully attested by the line of wrecks and sunken masts down its length. The harbor of Muntuk, whence there is a direct railway to the tin-mines, was busy with shipping, and the white walls and red roofs of the town showed prettily against the green.

The open Java Sea was as still and glassy as the straits had been, and for another breathless, cloudless day the ship’s engines beat almost inaudibly as we went southward through an enchanted silence. When the heat and glare of light from the midday sun so directly overhead drove us to the cabin, where swinging punkas gave air, we had additional suggestion of the tropics; for a passenger for Macassar, just down from Penang and Malacca, showed us fifty freshly cured specimens of birds, whose gorgeous plumage repeated the most brilliant and dazzling tints of the rainbow, the flower-garden, and the jewel-case, and left us bereft of adjectives and exclamations. Here we found another passenger, who spoke Dutch and looked the Hollander by every sign, but quickly claimed citizenship with us as a naturalized voter of the great republic. He asked if we lived in Java, and when we had answered that we were going to Java en touriste, “merely travelers,” he established comradeship by saying, “I am a traveling man myself—New York Life.” This naturalized American citizen said quite naturally, “We Dutchmen” and “our queen”—Americanisms with a loyal Holland ring.

After the gold, rose, gray, and purple sunset had shown us such a sky of splendor and sea of glory as we had but dreamed of above the equator, banks of dark vapor defined themselves in the south. A thin young moon hung among the huge yellow stars, that glowed steadily, with no cold twinkling, in that intense night sky; but before the Southern Cross could rise, dense clouds rolled up, and flashes, chains, and forks of angry lightning made a double spectacular play against the inky-black sky and the mirror-black sea. The captain promised us a tropical thunder-storm from those black clouds in the south, and went forward to give ship’s orders, advising us to make all haste below when the first drop should fall, as in an instant a sheet of blinding rain would surround the decks, against which the double awnings would be no more protection than so much gauze, and through which one could not see the ship’s length. The clouds remained stationary, however, and we missed the promised sensation, although we waited for hours on deck, the ship moving quietly through the soft, velvety air of the tropic’s blackest midnight, and the lightning-flashes becoming fainter and fainter.

MAP OF JAVA.

II
IN “JAVA MAJOR”

In the earliest morning a clean white lighthouse on an islet was seen ahead, and as the sun rose, bluish mountains came up from the sea, grew in height, outlined themselves, and then stood out, detached volcanic peaks of most lovely lines, against the purest, pale-blue sky; soft clouds floated up and clung to the summits; the blue and green at the water’s edge resolved itself into groves and lines of palms; and over sea and sky and the wonderland before us was all the dewy freshness of dawn in Eden. It looked very truly the “gem” and the “pearl of the East,” this “Java Major” of the ancients, and the Djawa of the native people, which has called forth more extravagant praise and had more adjectives expended on it than any other one island in the world. Yet this little continent is only 666 miles long and from 56 to 135 miles wide, and on an area of 49,197 square miles (nearly the same as that of the State of New York) supports a population of 24,000,000, greater than that of all the other islands of the Indian Ocean put together. With 1600 miles of coast-line, it has few harbors, the north shore being swampy and flat, with shallows extending far out, while the southern coast is steep and bold, and the one harbor of Tjilatjap breaks the long line of surf where the Indian Ocean beats against the southern cliffs. Fortunately, hurricanes and typhoons are unknown in the waters around this “summer land of the world,” and the seasons have but an even, regular change from wet to dry in Java. From April to October the dry monsoon blows from the southeast, and brings the best weather of the year—dry, hot days and the coolest nights. From October to April the southwest or wet monsoon blows. Then every day has its afternoon shower, the air is heavy and stifling, all the tropic world is asteam and astew and afloat, vegetation is magnificent, insect life triumphant, and the mountains are hidden in nearly perpetual mist. There are heavy thunderstorms at the turn of the monsoon, and the one we had watched from the sea the Hallowe’en night before our arrival had washed earth and air until the foliage glistened, the air fairly sparkled, nature wore her most radiant smiles, and the tropics were ideal.

It was more workaday and prosaic when the ship, steaming in between long breakwaters, made fast to the stone quays of Tandjon Priok, facing a long line of corrugated-iron warehouses, behind which was the railway connecting the port with the city of Batavia. The gradual silting up of Batavia harbor after an eruption of Mount Salak in 1699, which first dammed and then sent torrents of mud and sand down the Tjiliwong River, finally obliged commerce to remove to this deep bay six miles farther east, where the colonials have made a model modern harbor, at a cost of twenty-six and a half million gulden, all paid from current revenues, without the island’s ceasing to pay its regular tribute to the crown of Holland. The customs officers at Tandjon Priok were courteous and lenient, passing our tourist luggage with the briefest formality, and kindly explaining how our steamer-chairs could be stored in the railway rooms until our return to port. It is but nine miles from the Tandjon Priok wharf to the main station in the heart of the original city of Batavia—a stretch of swampy ground dotted and lined with palm-groves and banana-patches, with tiny woven baskets of houses perched on stilts clustered at the foot of tall cocoa-trees that are the staff and source of life and of every economical blessing of native existence. We leaped excitedly from one side of the little car to the other, to see each more and more tropical picture; groups of bare brown children frolicking in the road, and mothers with babies astride of their hips, or swinging comfortably in a scarf knotted across one shoulder, and every-day life going on under the palms most naturally, although to our eyes it was so strange and theatrical.

At the railway-station we met the sadoe (dos-à-dos), a two-wheeled cart, which is the common vehicle of hire of the country, and is drawn by a tiny Timor or Sandalwood pony, with sometimes a second pony attached outside of the shafts. The broad cushioned seat over the axles will accommodate four persons, two sitting each way. The driver faces front comfortably; but the passenger, with no back to lean against but the driver’s, must hold to the canopy-frame while he is switched about town backward in the footman’s place, for one gulden or forty cents the hour.

Whether one comes to Java from India or China, there is hasty change from the depreciated silver currency of all Asia to the unaltered gold standard of Holland, and the sudden expensiveness of the world is a sad surprise. The Netherlands unit of value, the gulden (value, forty cents United States gold), is as often called a florin, a rupee, or a dollar—the “Mexican dollar” or the equivalent “British dollar” of the Straits Settlements, a coin which trade necessities drove British conservatism to minting, which act robs the Briton of the privilege of making further remarks upon “the almighty dollar” of the United States, with its unchanging value of one hundred cents gold. This confusion of coins, with prices quoted indifferently in guldens, florins, rupees, and dollars, is further increased by dividing the gulden into one hundred cents, like the Ceylon rupee, so that, between these Dutch fractions, the true cents of the United States dollar that one instinctively thinks of, and the depreciated cents of the British or the battered Mexican dollar, one’s brain begins to whirl when prices are quoted, or any evil day of reckoning comes.

No Europeans live at Tandjon Priok, nor in the old city of Batavia, which from the frightful mortality during two centuries was known as “the graveyard of Europeans.” The banks and business houses, the Chinese and Arab towns, are in the “old town”; but Europeans desert that quarter before sundown, and betake themselves to the “new town” suburbs, where every house is in a park of its own, and the avenues are broad and straight, and all the distances are magnificent. The city of Batavia, literally “fair meadows,” grandiloquently “the queen of the East,” and without exaggeration “the gridiron of the East,” dates from 1621, when the Dutch removed from Bantam, where quarrels between Portuguese, Javanese, and the East India Company had been disturbing trade for fifteen years, and built Fort Jacatra at the mouth of a river off which a cluster of islands sheltered a fine harbor. Its position in the midst of swamps was unhealthy, and the mortality was so appalling as to seem incredible. Dutch records tell of 87,000 soldiers and sailors dying in the government hospital between 1714 and 1776, and of 1,119,375 dying at Batavia between 1730 and August, 1752—a period of twenty-two years and eight months.[1] The deadly Java fever occasioning this seemingly incredible mortality was worst between the years 1733 and 1738, during which time 2000 of the Dutch East India Company’s servants and free Christians died annually. Staunton, who visited Batavia with Lord Macartney’s embassy in 1793, called it the “most unwholesome place in the universe,” and “the pestilential climate” was considered a sufficient defense against attack from any European power.

The people were long in learning that those who went to the higher suburbs to sleep, and built houses of the most open construction to admit of the fullest sweep of air, were free from the fever of the walled town, surrounded by swamps, cut by stagnant canals, and facing a harbor whose mud-banks were exposed at low tide. The city walls were destroyed at the beginning of this century by the energetic Marshal Daendels, who began building the new town. The quaint old air-tight Dutch buildings were torn down, and streets were widened; and there is now a great outspread town of red-roofed, whitewashed houses, with no special features or picturesqueness to make its street-scenes either distinctively Dutch or tropical. Modern Batavia had 111,763 inhabitants on December 31, 1894, less than a tenth of whom are Europeans, with 26,776 Chinese and 72,934 natives. While the eighteenth-century Stadhuis might have been brought from Holland entire, a steam tramway starts from its door and thence shrieks its way to the farthest suburb, the telephone “hellos” from center to suburb, and modern inventions make tropical living possible.

The Dutch do not welcome tourists, nor encourage one to visit their paradise of the Indies. Too many travelers have come, seen, and gone away to tell disagreeable truths about Dutch methods and rule; to expose the source and means of the profitable returns of twenty million dollars and more for each of so many years of the last and the preceding century—all from islands whose whole area only equals that of the State of New York. Although the tyrannic rule and the “culture system,” or forced labor, are things of the dark past, the Dutch brain is slow and suspicious, and the idea being fixed fast that no stranger comes to Java on kindly or hospitable errands, the colonial authorities must know within twenty-four hours why one visits the Indies. They demand one’s name, age, religion, nationality, place of nativity, and occupation, the name of the ship that brought the suspect to Java, and the name of its captain—a dim threat lurking in this latter query of holding the unlucky mariner responsible should his importation prove an expense or embarrassment to the island. Still another permit—a toelatings-kaart, or “admission ticket”—must be obtained if one wishes to travel farther than Buitenzorg, the cooler capital, forty miles away in the hills. The tourist pure and simple, the sight-seer and pleasure traveler, is not yet quite comprehended, and his passports usually accredit him as traveling in the interior for “scientific purposes.” Guides or efficient couriers in the real sense do not exist yet. The English-speaking servant is rare and delusive, yet a necessity unless one speaks Dutch or Low Malay. Of all the countries one may ever travel in, none equals Java in the difficulty of being understood; and it is a question, too, whether the Malays who do not know any English are harder to get along with than the Dutch who know a little.

Thirty years ago Alfred Russel Wallace inveighed against the unnecessary discomforts, annoyances, and expense of travel in Java, and every tourist since has repeated his plaint. The philippics of returned travelers furnish steady amusement for Singapore residents; and no one brings back the same enthusiasm that embarked with him. It is not the Java of the Javanese that these returned ones berate so vehemently, but the Netherlands India, and the state created and brought about by the merciless, cold-blooded, rapacious Hollanders who came half-way round the world and down to the equator, nine thousand miles away from their homes, to acquire an empire and enslave a race, and who impose their hampering customs and restrictions upon even alien visitors. Java undoubtedly is “the very finest and most interesting tropical island in the world,” and the Javanese the most gentle, attractive, and innately refined people of the East, after the Japanese; but the Dutch in Java “beat the Dutch” in Europe ten points to one, and there is nothing so surprising and amazing, in all man’s proper study of mankind, as this equatorial Hollander transplanted from the cold fens of Europe; nor is anything so strange as the effect of a high temperature on Low-Country temperament. The most rigid, conventional, narrow, thrifty, prudish, and Protestant people in Europe bloom out in the forcing-house of the tropics into strange laxity, and one does not know the Hollanders until one sees them in this “summer land of the world,” whither they threatened to emigrate in a body during the time of the Spanish Inquisition.

III
BATAVIA, QUEEN OF THE EAST

When one has driven through the old town of Batavia and seen its crowded bazaars and streets, and has followed the lines of bricked canals, where small natives splash and swim, women beat the family linen, and men go to and fro in tiny boats, all in strange travesty of the solemn canals of the old country, he comes to the broader avenues of the new town, lined with tall tamarind- and waringen-trees, with plumes of palms, and pyramids of blazing Madagascar flame-trees in blossom. He is driven into the long garden court of the Hotel Nederlanden, and there beholds a spectacle of social life and customs that nothing in all travel can equal for distinct shock and sensation. We had seen some queer things in the streets,—women lolling barefooted and in startling dishabille in splendid equipages,—but concluded them to be servants or half-castes; but there in the hotel was an undress parade that beggars description, and was as astounding on the last as on the first day in the country. Woman’s vanity and man’s conventional ideas evidently wilt at the line, and no formalities pass the equator, when distinguished citizens and officials can roam and lounge about hotel courts in pajamas and bath slippers, and bare-ankled women, clad only in the native sarong, or skirt, and a white dressing-jacket, go unconcernedly about their affairs in streets and public places until afternoon. It is a dishabille beyond all burlesque pantomime, and only shipwreck on a desert island would seem sufficient excuse for women being seen in such an ungraceful, unbecoming attire—an undress that reveals every defect while concealing beauty, that no loveliness can overcome, and that has neither color nor grace nor picturesqueness to recommend it.

The hotel is a series of one-storied buildings surrounding the four sides of a garden court, the projecting eaves giving a continuous covered gallery that is the general corridor. The bedrooms open directly upon this broad gallery, and the space in front of each room, furnished with lounging-chairs, table, and reading-lamp, is the sitting-room of each occupant by day. There is never any jealous hiding behind curtains or screens. The whole hotel register is in evidence, sitting or spread in reclining-chairs. Men in pajamas thrust their bare feet out bravely, puffing clouds of rank Sumatra tobacco smoke as they stared at the new arrivals; women rocked and stared as if we were the unusual spectacle, and not they; and children sprawled on the cement flooring, in only the most intimate undergarments of civilized children. One turned his eyes from one undressed family group only to encounter some more surprising dishabille; and meanwhile servants were hanging whole mildewed wardrobes on clothes-lines along this open hotel corridor, while others were ironing their employers’ garments on this communal porch.

A JAVANESE YOUNG WOMAN.

We were sure we had gone to the wrong hotel; but the Nederlanden was vouched for as the best, and when the bell sounded, over one hundred guests came into the vaulted dining-room and were seated at the one long table. The men wore proper coats and clothes at this midday riz tavel (rice table), but the women and children came as they were—sans gêne.

The Batavian day begins with coffee and toast, eggs and fruit, at any time between six and nine o’clock; and the affairs of the day are despatched before noon, when that sacred, solemn, solid feeding function, the riz tavel, assembles all in shady, spacious dining-rooms, free from the creaking and flapping of the punka, so prominent everywhere else in the East. Rice is the staple of the midday meal, and one is expected to fill the soup-plate before him with boiled rice, and on that heap as much as he may select from eight or ten dishes, a tray of curry condiments being also passed with this great first course. Bits of fish, duck, chicken, beef, bird, omelet, and onions rose upon my neighbors’ plates, and spoonfuls of a thin curried mixture were poured over the rice, before the conventional chutneys, spices, cocoanut, peppers, and almond went to the conglomerate mountain resting upon the “rice table” below. Beefsteak, a salad, and then fruit and coffee brought the midday meal to a close. Squeamish folk, unseasoned tourists, and well-starched Britons with small sense of humor complain of loss of appetite at these hotel riz tavels; and those Britons further criticize the way in which the Dutch fork, or most often the Dutch knife-blade, is loaded, aimed, and shoveled with a long, straight stroke to the Dutch interior; and they also criticize the way in which portions of bird or chicken are managed, necessitating and explaining the presence of the finger-bowl from the beginning of each meal. But we forgot all that had gone before when the feast was closed with the mangosteen—nature’s final and most perfect effort in fruit creation.

After the riz tavel every one slumbers—as one naturally must after such a very “square” meal—until four o’clock, when a bath and tea refresh the tropic soul, the world dresses in the full costume of civilization, and the slatternly women of the earlier hours go forth in the latest finery of good fortune, twenty-six days from Amsterdam, for the afternoon driving and visiting, that continue to the nine-o’clock dinner-hour. Batavian fashion does not take its airing in the jerky sadoe, but in roomy “vis-à-vis” or barouches, comfortable “milords” or giant victorias, that, being built to Dutch measures, would comfortably accommodate three ordinary people to each seat, and are drawn by gigantic Australian horses, or “Walers” (horses from New South Wales), to match these turnouts of Brobdingnag.

Society is naturally narrow, provincial, colonial, conservative, and insular, even to a degree beyond that known in Holland. The governor-general, whose salary is twice that of the President of the United States, lives in a palace at Buitenzorg, forty miles away in the hills, with a second palace still higher up in the mountains, and comes to the Batavia palace only on state occasions. This ruler of twenty-four million souls, who rules as a viceroy instructed from The Hague, with the aid of a secretary-general and a Council of the Indies, has, in addition to his salary of a hundred thousand dollars, an allowance of sixty thousand dollars a year for entertaining, and it is expected that he will maintain a considerable state and splendor. He has a standing army of thirty thousand, one third Europeans, of various nationalities, raised by volunteer enlistment in Holland, who are well paid, carefully looked after, and recruited by long stays at Buitenzorg after short terms of service at the sea-ports. After the Indian mutiny the Dutch were in great fear of an uprising of the natives of Java, and placed less confidence in native troops. Only Europeans can hold officers’ commissions; and while the native soldiers are all Mohammedans, and great consideration is paid their religious scruples, care is taken not to let the natives of any one province or district compose a majority in any one regiment, and these regiments frequently change posts. The colonial navy has done great service to the world in suppressing piracy in the Java Sea and around the archipelago, although steam navigation inevitably brought an end to piracy and picturesque adventure. The little navy helps maintain an admirable lighthouse service, and with such convulsions as that of Krakatau always possible, and changes often occurring in the bed of the shallow seas, its surveyors are continually busied with making new charts.

The islands of Amboyna, Borneo, Celebes, and Sumatra are also ruled by this one governor-general of the Netherlands Indies, through residents; and the island of Java is divided into twenty-two residencies or provinces, a resident, or local governor, ruling—or, as “elder brother,” effectually advising—in the few provinces ostensibly ruled by native princes. A resident receives ten thousand dollars a year, with house provided and a liberal allowance made for the extra incidental expenses of the position—for traveling, entertaining, and acknowledging in degree the gifts of native princes. University graduates are chosen for this colonial service, and take a further course in the colonial institute at Haarlem, which includes, besides the study of the Malay language, the economic botany of the Indies, Dutch law, and Mohammedan justice, since, in their capacity as local magistrates, they must make their decisions conform with the tenets of the Koran, which is the general moral law, together with the unwritten Javanese code. They are entitled to retire upon a pension after twenty years of service—half the time demanded of those in the civil service in Holland. All these residents are answerable to the secretary of the colony, appointed by the crown, and much of executive detail has to be submitted to the home government’s approval. Naturally there is much friction between all these functionaries, and etiquette is punctilious to a degree. A formal court surrounds the governor-general, and is repeated in miniature at every residency. The pensioned native sovereigns, princes, and regents maintain all the forms, etiquette, and barbaric splendor of their old court life, elaborated by European customs. The three hundred Dutch officials condescend equally to the rich planters and to the native princes; the planters hate and deride the officials; the natives hate the Dutch of either class, and despise their own princes who are subservient to the Dutch; and the wars and jealousies of rank and race and caste, of white and brown, of native and imported folk, flourish with tropical luxuriance.

Batavian life differs considerably from life in British India and all the rest of Asia, where the British-built and conventionally ordered places support the same formal social order of England unchanged, save for a few luxuries and concessions incident to the climate. The Dutchman does not waste his perspiration on tennis or golf or cricket, or on any outdoor pastime more exciting than horse-racing. He does not make well-ordered and expensive dinners his one chosen form of hospitality. He dines late and dines elaborately, but the more usual form of entertainment in Batavia is in evening receptions or musicales, for which the spacious houses, with their great white porticos, are well adapted. Batavian residents have each a paradise park around their dwellings, and the white houses of classic architecture, bowered in magnificent trees and palms, shrubs and vines and blooming plants, are most attractive by day. At night, when the great portico, which is drawing-room and living-room and as often dining-room, is illuminated by many lamps, each lovely villa glows like a fairyland in its dark setting. If the portico lamps are not lighted, it is a sign of “not at home,” and mynheer and his family may sit in undress at their ease. There are weekly concerts at the Harmonie and Concordia clubs, where the groups around iron tables might have been summoned by a magician from some continental garden. There are such clubs in every town on the island, the government subsidizing the opera and supporting military bands of the first order; and they furnish society its center and common meeting-place. One sees fine gowns and magnificent jewels; ladies wear the heavy silks and velvets of an Amsterdam winter in these tropical gardens, and men dance in black coats and broadcloth uniforms. Society is brilliant, formal, and by lamplight impressive; but when by daylight one meets the same fair beauties and bejeweled matrons sockless, in sarongs and flapping slippers, the disillusionment is complete.

The show-places of Batavia are easily seen in a day: the old town hall, the Stadkirche, the lighthouse, the old warehouse, and the walled gate of Peter Elberfeld’s house, with the spiked skull of that half-caste rebel against Dutch rule pointing a more awful reminder than the inscription in several languages to his “horrid memory.” The pride of the city, and the most creditable thing on the island, is the Museum of the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences (“Bataviaasch Genootschap von Kunsten en Wepenschappen”), known sufficiently to the world of science and letters as “the Batavian Society,” of which Sir Stamford Raffles was the first great inspirer and exploiter, after it had dreamed along quietly in colonial isolation for a few years of the last century. In his time were begun the excavations of the Hindu temples and the archæological work which the Dutch government and the Batavian Society have since carried on, and which have helped place that association among the foremost learned societies of the world. The museum is housed in a beautiful Greek temple of a building whose white walls are shaded by magnificent trees, and faces the broad Koenig’s Plein, the largest parade-ground in the world, the Batavians say. The halls, surrounding a central court, shelter a complete and wonderful exhibit of Javanese antiquities and art works, of arms, weapons, implements, ornaments, costumes, masks, basketry, textiles, musical instruments, models of boats and houses, examples of fine old metal-work, and of all the industries of these gifted people. It is a place of absorbing interest; but with no labels and no key except the native janitor’s pantomime, one’s visit is often filled with exasperation.

There is a treasure-chamber heaped with gold shields, helmets, thrones, state umbrellas, boxes, salvers, betel and tobacco sets of gold, with jeweled daggers and krises of finest blades, patterned with curious veinings. Tributes and gifts from native sultans and princes display the precious metals in other curious forms, and a fine large coco-de-mer, the fabled twin nut of the Seychelles palm, that was long supposed to grow in some unknown, mysterious isle of the sea-gods, is throned on a golden base with all the honors due such a talisman. The ruined temples and sites of abandoned cities in Middle Java have yielded rich ornaments, necklaces, ear-rings, head-dresses, seals, plates, and statuettes of gold and silver. A room is filled with bronze weapons, bells, tripods, censers, images, and all the appurtenances of Buddhist worship, characteristic examples of the Greco-Buddhist art of India, which even more surprisingly confronts one in these treasures from the jungles of the far-away tropical island. A central hall is filled with bas-reliefs and statues from these ruins of Buddhist and Brahmanic temples, in which the Greek influence is quite as marked, and Egyptian and Assyrian suggestions in the sculptures give one other ideas to puzzle over.

The society’s library is rich in exchanges, scientific and art publications of all countries; and the row of reports of the Smithsonian Institution, the Geological Survey and Bureau of Ethnology, are as much a matter of pride to the American visitor as the framed diplomas of institutes and international expositions are to the Batavian curator. The council-room contains the state chairs of native sovereigns, and portraits and souvenirs of the great explorers and navigators who passed this way in the last century and in the early years of this cycle. Captain Cook left stores of South Sea curios on his way to and fro, and during this century the museum has been the pet and pride of Dutch residents and officials, and the subject of praise by all visitors.

The palace of the governor-general on this vast Koenig’s Plein is a beautiful modern structure, but more interest attaches to the old palace of the Waterloo Plein, the palys built by the great Marshal Daendels, who, supplanted by the British after but three years’ energetic rule, withdrew to Europe.

IV
THE KAMPONGS

The Tjina, or China, and the Arab kampongs, are show-places to the stranger in the curious features of life and civic government they present. Each of these foreign kampongs, or villages, is under the charge of a captain or commander, whom the Dutch authorities hold responsible for the order and peace of their compatriots, since they do not allow to these yellow colonials so-called “European freedom”—an expression which constitutes a sufficient admission of the existence of “Asiatic restraint.” Great wealth abides in both these alien quarters, whose leading families have been there for generations, and have absorbed all retail trade, and as commission merchants, money-lenders, and middlemen have garnered great profits and earned the hatred of Dutch and Javanese alike. The lean and hooked-nosed followers of the prophet conquered the island in the fifteenth century, and have built their messigits, or mosques, in every province. The Batavian messigit is a cool little blue-and-white-tiled building, with a row of inlaid wooden clogs and loose leather shoes at the door; and turbaned heads within bow before the mihrab that points northwestward to Mecca. Since the Mohammedan conquest of 1475, the Javanese are Mohammedan if anything; but they take their religion easily, and are so lukewarm in the faith of the fire and sword that they would easily relapse to their former mild Brahmanism if Islam’s power were released. The Dutch have always prohibited the pilgrimages to Mecca, since those returning with the green turban were viewed with reverence and accredited with supernatural powers that made their influence a menace to Dutch rule. Arab priests have always been enemies of the government and foremost in inciting the people to rebellion against Dutch and native rulers; but little active evangelical work seems to have been done by Christian missionaries to counteract Mohammedanism, save at the town of Depok, near Batavia.

In all the banks and business houses is found the lean-fingered Chinese comprador, or accountant, and the rattling buttons of his abacus, or counting-board, play the inevitable accompaniment to financial transactions, as everywhere else east of Colombo. The 251,325 Chinese in Netherlands India present a curious study in the possibilities of their race. Under the strong, tyrannical rule of the Dutch they thrive, show ambition to adopt Western ways, and approach more nearly to European standards than one could believe possible. Chinese conservatism yields first in costume and social manners; the pigtail shrinks to a mere symbolic wisp, and the well-to-do Batavian Chinese dresses faultlessly after the London model, wears spotless duck coat and trousers, patent-leather shoes, and, in top or derby hat, sits complacent in a handsome victoria drawn by imported horses, with liveried Javanese on the box. One meets correctly gotten-up Celestial equestrians trotting around Waterloo Plein or the alleys of Buitenzorg, each followed by an obsequious groom, the thin remnant of the Manchu queue slipped inside the coat being the only thing to suggest Chinese origin. The rich Chinese live in beautiful villas, in gorgeously decorated houses built on ideal tropical lines; and although having no political or social recognition in the land, entertain no intention of returning to China. They load their Malay wives with diamonds and jewels, and spend liberally for the education of their children. The Dutch tax, judge, punish, and hold them in the same regard as the natives, with whom they have intermarried for three centuries, until there is a large mixed class of these Paranaks in every part of the island. The native hatred of the Chinese is an inheritance of those past centuries when the Dutch farmed out the revenue to Chinese, who, being assigned so many thousand acres of rice-land, and the forced labor of the people on them, gradually extended their boundaries, and by increasing exactions and secret levies oppressed the people with a tyranny and rapacity the Dutch could not approach. In time the Chinese fomented insurrection against the Dutch, and in 1740, joining with disaffected natives, entrenched themselves in a suburban fort. The Dutch in alarm gave the order, and over 20,000 Chinese then within the walls were put to death, not an infant, a woman, nor an aged person being spared. In fear of the wrath of the Emperor of China, elaborate excuses were framed and sent to Peking. Sage old Keen-Lung responded only by saying that the Dutch had served them right, that any death was too good for Chinese who would desert the graves of their ancestors.

After that incident they were restrained from all monopolies and revenue farming, and restricted to their present humble political state. An absolute exclusion act was passed in 1837, but was soon revoked, and the Chinese hold financial supremacy over both Dutch and natives, trade and commerce being hopelessly in the hands of the skilful Chinese comprador. The Dutch vent their dislike by an unmerciful taxation. They formerly assessed them according to the length of their queues and for each long finger-nail. The Chinese are mulcted on landing and leaving, for birth and death, for every business venture and privilege; yet they prosper and remain, and these Paranaks in a few more generations may attain the social and political equality they seek. It all proves that under a strong, tyrannical government the Chinese make good citizens, and can easily put away the notions and superstitions that in China itself hold countless millions in the bondage of a long-dead past. The recent exposure of Chinese forgeries of Java bank-notes to the value of three million pounds sterling has put the captains of Batavia and Samarang kampongs in prison, and has led to wholesale arrests of rich Chinese throughout the island.

Native life swarms in this land of the betel and banana, where there seems to be more of inherent dream and calm than in other lands of the lotus. The Javanese are the finer flowers of the Malay race—a people possessed of a civilization, arts, and literature in that golden period before the Mohammedan and European conquests. They have gentle voices, gentle manners, fine and expressive features, and are the one people of Asia besides the Japanese who have real charm and attraction for the alien. They are more winning, too, by contrast, after one has met the harsh, unlovely, and unwashed people of China, or the equally unwashed, cringing Hindu. They are a little people, and one feels the same indulgent, protective sense as toward the Japanese. Their language is soft and musical—“the Italian of the tropics”; their ideas are poetic; and their love of flowers and perfumes, of music and the dance, of heroic plays and of every emotional form of art, proves them as innately esthetic as their distant cousins, the Japanese, in whom there is so large an admixture of Malay stock. Their reverence for rank and age, and their elaborate etiquette and punctilious courtesy to one another, are as marked even in the common people as among the Japanese; but their abject, crouching humility before their Dutch employers, and the brutality of the latter to them, are a theme for sadder thinking, and calculated to make the blood boil. When one actually sees the quiet, inoffensive peddlers, who chiefly beseech with their eyes, furiously kicked out of the hotel courtyard when mynheer does not choose to buy, and native children actually lifted by an ear and hurled away from the vantage-point on the curbstone which a pajamaed Dutchman wishes for himself while some troops march by, one is content not to see or know any more.

These friendly little barefoot people are of endless interest, and their daily markets, or passers, are panoramas of life and color that one longs to transplant entire. Life is so simple and primitive, too, in the sunshine and warmth of the tropics. A bunch of bananas, a basket of steamed rice, and a leaf full of betel preparations comprise the necessaries and luxuries of daily living. With the rice may go many peppers and curried messes of ground cocoanut, which one sees made and offered for sale in small dabs laid on bits of banana-leaf, the wrapping-paper of the tropics. Pinned with a cactus-thorn, a bit of leaf makes a primitive bag, bowl, or cup, and a slip of it serves as a sylvan spoon. All classes chew the betel- or areca-nut, bits of which, wrapped in betel-leaf with lime, furnish cheer and stimulant, dye the mouth, and keep the lips streaming with crimson juice. In Canton and in all Cochin China, across the peninsula, and throughout island and continental India, men and women have equal delight in this peppery stimulant. The Javanese lays his quid of betel tobacco between the lower lip and teeth, and so great seem to be the solace and comfort of it that dozing venders and peddlers will barely turn an eye and grunt responses to one’s eager “Brapa?” (“How much?”)

PAINTING SARONGS.

Peddlers bring to one’s doorway fine Bantam basketry and bales of the native cotton cloth, or battek, patterned in curious designs that have been in use from time out of mind. These native art fabrics are sold at the passers also, and one soon recognizes the conventional designs, and distinguishes the qualities and merits of these hand-patterned cottons that constitute the native dress. The sarong, or skirt, worn by men and women alike, is a strip of cotton two yards long and one yard deep, which is drawn tightly around the hips, the fullness gathered in front, and by an adroit twist made so firm that a belt is not necessary to native wearers. The sarong has always one formal panel design, which is worn at the front or side, and the rest of the surface is covered with the intricate ornaments in which native fancy runs riot. There are geometrical and line combinations, in which appear the swastika and the curious latticings of central Asia; others are as bold and natural as anything Japanese; and in others still, the palm-leaves and quaint animal forms of India and Persia attest the rival art influences that have swept over these refined, adaptive, assimilative people. One favorite serpentine pattern running in diagonal lines does not need explanation in this land of gigantic worms and writhing crawlers; nor that other pattern where centipedes and insect forms cover the ground; nor that where the fronds of cocoa-palm wave, and the strange shapes of mangos, jacks, and breadfruit are interwoven. The deer and tapir, and the “hunting-scene” patterns are reserved for native royalty’s exclusive wear. In village and wayside cottages up-country we afterward watched men and women painting these cloths, tracing a first outline in a rich brown waxy dye, which is the foundation and dominant color in all these batteks. The parts which are to be left white are covered with wax, and the cloth is dipped in or brushed over with the dye. This resist, or mordant, must be applied for each color, and the wax afterwards steamed out in hot water, so that a sarong goes through many processes and handlings, and is often the work of weeks. The dyes are applied hot through a little tin funnel of an implement tapering down to a thin point, which is used like a painter’s brush, but will give the fine line- and dot-work of a pen-and-ink drawing. The sarong’s value depends upon the fineness of the drawing, the elaborateness of the design, and the number of colors employed; and beginning as low as one dollar, these brilliant cottons, or hand-painted calico sarongs, increase in price to even twenty or thirty dollars. The Dutch ladies vie with one another in their sarongs as much as native women, and their dishabille dress of the early hours has not always economy to recommend it. The battek also appears in the slandang, or long shoulder-scarf, which used to match the sarong and complete the native costume when passed under the arms and crossed at the back, thus covering the body from the armpits to the waist. It is still worn knotted over the mother’s shoulder as a sling or hammock for a child; but Dutch fashion has imposed the same narrow, tight-sleeved kabaia, the baju, or jacket, that Dutch women wear with the sarong. The kam kapala, a square handkerchief tied around men’s heads as a variant of the turban, is of the same figured battek, and, with the slandang, often exhibits charming color combinations and intricate Persian designs. When one conquers his prejudices and associated ideas enough to pay seemingly fancy prices for these examples of free-hand calico printing, the taste grows, and he soon shares the native longing for a sarong of every standard and novel design.

The native silversmiths hammer out good designs in silver relief for betel- and tobacco-boxes, and exhibit great taste and invention in belt- and jacket-clasps, and in heavy knobs of hairpins and ear-rings, that are often made of gold and incrusted over with gems for richer folk.

There are no historic spots nor show-places of native creation in Batavia; no kratons, or aloon-aloons, as their palaces and courtyards are called; and only a sentimental interest for a virtual exile pining in his own country is attached to the villa of Raden Saleh. This son of the regent of Samarang was educated in Europe, and lived there for twenty-three years, developing decided talents as an artist, and enjoying the friendship of many men of rank and genius on the Continent, among the latter being Eugène Sue, who is said to have taken Raden Saleh as model for the Eastern Prince in “The Wandering Jew.” In Java he found himself sadly isolated from his own people by his European tastes and habits; and he had little in common with the coarse, rapacious mynheers whose sole thoughts were of crops and gulden. “Coffee and sugar, sugar and coffee, are all that is talked here. It is a dreary atmosphere for an artist,” said Raden Saleh to D’Almeida, who visited him at Batavia sixty odd years ago. He has left a monument of his taste in this charming villa, in a park whose land is now a vegetable-patch, its shady pleasance a beer-garden and exposition-ground, and the sign “Tu Huur” (“To Hire”) hung from the royal entrance. The exposition of arts and industries in these grounds in 1893 was a great event in Java, the governor-general Van der Wyk opening and closing the fair by electric signal, and the natives making a particularly interesting display of their products and crafts.

V
TO THE HILLS

One’s most earnest desire, in the scorch of Batavian noondays and stifling Batavian nights, is to seek refuge in “the hills”—in the dark-green groves and forests of the Blue Mountains, that are ranged with such admirable effect as background when one steams in from the Java Sea. At Buitenzorg, only forty miles away and seven hundred and fifty feet above the sea, heat-worn people find refuge in an entirely different climate, an atmosphere of bracing clearness tempered to moderate summer’s warmth. Buitenzorg (“without care”), the Dutch Sans Souci, has been a general refuge and sanitarium for Europeans, the real seat of government, and the home of the governor-general for more than a century. It is the pride and show-place of Java, the great center of its social life, leisure interests, and attractions. The higher officials and many Batavian merchants and bankers have homes at Buitenzorg, and residents from other parts of the island make it their place of recreation and goal of holiday trips.

Undressed Batavia was just rousing from its afternoon nap, and the hotel court was surrounded with barefoot guests in battek pajamas and scant sarongs, a sockless, collarless, unblushing company, that yawned and stared as we drove away, rejoicing to leave this Sans Gêne for Sans Souci. The Weltevreden Station, on the vast Koenig’s Plein, a spacious, stone-floored building, whose airy halls and waiting- and refreshment-rooms are repeated on almost as splendid scale at all the large towns of the island, was enlivened with groups of military officers, whose heavy broadcloth uniforms, trailing sabers, and clanking spurs transported us back from the tropics to some chilly European railway-station, and presented the extreme contrast of colonial life. The train that came panting from Tandjon Priok was made up of first-, second-, and third-class cars, all built on the American plan, in that they were long cars and not carriages, and we entered through doors at the end platforms. The first-class cars swung on easy springs; there were modern car-windows in tight frames, also window-frames of wire netting; while thick wooden venetians outside of all, and a double roof, protected as much as possible from the sun’s heat. The deep arm-chair seats were upholstered with thick leather cushions, the walls were set with blue-and-white tiles repeating Mauve’s and Mesdag’s pictures, and adjustable tables, overhead racks, and a dressing-room furnished all the railroad comforts possible. The railway service of Netherlands India is a vast improvement on, and its cars are in striking contrast to, the loose-windowed, springless, dusty, hard-benched carriages in which first-class passengers are jolted across British India. The second-class cars in Java rest on springs also, but more passengers are put in a compartment, and the fittings are simpler; while the open third-class cars, where native passengers are crowded together, have a continuous window along each side, and the benches are often without backs. The fares average 2.2 United States cents a kilometer (about five eighths of a mile) for first class, 1.6 cents second class, and 6 mills third class. The first-class fare from Batavia to Sourabaya, at the east end of the island, is but 50 gulden ($20) for the 940-kilometer journey, accomplished in two days’ train-travel of twelve and fourteen hours each, so that the former heavy expense (over a dollar a mile for post-horses, after one had bought or rented a traveling-carriage) and the delays of travel in Java are done away with.

The railways have been built by both the government and private corporations, connecting and working together, the first line dating from 1875. The continuous railway line across the island was completed and opened with official ceremonies in November, 1894. The gap of one hundred miles or more across the “terra ingrata,” the low-lying swamp and fever regions either side of Tjilatjap, had existed for years after the track was completed to the east and west of it. Dutch engineers built and manage the road, but the staff, the working force of the line, are natives, or Chinese of the more or less mixed but educated class filling the middle ground between Europeans and natives, between the upper and lower ranks. Wonderful skill was shown in leading the road over the mountains, and in building a firm track and bridges through the reeking swamps, where no white man could labor, even if he could live. The trains do not run at night, which would be a great advantage in a hot country, for the reason that the train crews are composed entirely of natives (since such work is considered beneath the grade of any European), and the cautious Dutch will not trust native engineers after dark. Through trains start from either end of the line and from the half-way stations at five and six o’clock each morning, and run until the short twilight and pitch-darkness that so quickly succeed the unchanging six-o’clock tropical sunset. These early morning starts, and the eight- and nine-o’clock dinner of the Java hotels, make travel most wearisome. One may buy fruit at every station platform, and always tea, coffee, chocolate, wine and schnapps, bread and biscuits at the station buffets. At the larger stations there are dining-rooms, or a service of lunch-baskets, in which the Gargantuan riz tavel, or luncheon, is served hot in one’s compartment as the train moves on.

The hour-and-a-half’s ride from Batavia to Buitenzorg gave us an epitome of tropical landscapes as the train ran between a double panorama of beauty. The soil was a deep, intense red, as if the heat of the sun and the internal fires of this volcanic belt had warmed the fruitful earth to this glowing color, which contrasted so strongly with the complemental green of grain and the groves of palms and cacao-trees. The level rice-fields were being plowed, worked, flooded, planted, weeded, and harvested side by side, the several crops of the year going on continuously, with seemingly no regard to seasons. Nude little boys, astride of smooth gray water-buffaloes, posed statuesquely while those leisurely animals browsed afield; and no pastoral pictures of Java remain clearer in memory than those of patient little brown children sitting half days and whole days on buffalo-back, to brush flies and guide the stupid-looking creatures to greener and more luscious bits of herbage. Many stories are told of the affection the water-ox often manifests for his boy keeper, killing tigers and snakes in his defense, and performing prodigies of valor and intelligence; but one doubts the tales the more he sees of this hideous beast of Asia. Men and women were wading knee-deep in paddy-field muck, transplanting the green rice-shoots from the seed-beds, and picturesque harvest groups posed in tableaux, as the train shrieked by. Children rolled at play before the gabled baskets of houses clustered in toy villages beneath the inevitable cocoa-palms and bananas, the combination of those two useful trees being the certain sign of a kampong, or village, when the braided-bamboo houses are invisible.

RICE-FIELDS.

At Depok there was a halt to pass the down-train, and the natives of this one Christian village and mission-station, the headquarters of evangelical work in Java, flocked to the platform with a prize horticultural display of all the fruits of the season for sale. The record of mission work in Java is a short one, as, after casting out the Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, the Dutch forbade any others to enter, and Spanish rule in Holland had perhaps taught them not to try to impose a strange religion on a people. During Sir Stamford Raffles’s rule, English evangelists began work among the natives, but were summarily interrupted and obliged to withdraw when Java was returned to Holland. All missionaries were strictly excluded until the humanitarian agitation in Europe, which resulted in the formal abolition of slavery and the gradual abandonment of the culture system, led the government to do a little for the Christianization and education of the people. The government supports twenty-nine Protestant pastors and ten Roman Catholic priests, primarily for the spiritual benefit of the European residents, and their spheres are exactly defined—proselytizing and mutual rivalries being forbidden. Missionaries from other countries are not allowed to settle and work among the people, and whatever may be said against this on higher moral grounds, the colonial government has escaped endless friction with the consuls and governments of other countries. The authorities have been quite willing to let the natives enjoy their mild Mohammedanism, and our Moslem servant spoke indifferently of mission efforts at Depok, with no scorn, no contempt, and apparently no hostility to the European faith.

Until recently, no steps were taken to educate the Javanese, and previous to 1864 they were not allowed to study the Dutch language. All colonial officers are obliged to learn Low Malay, that being the recognized language of administration and justice, instead of the many Javanese and Sundanese dialects, with their two forms of polite and common speech. These officials receive promotion and preferment as they make progress in the spoken and written language. Low Malay is the most readily acquired of all languages, as there are no harsh gutturals or difficult consonants, and the construction is very simple. Children who learn the soft, musical Malay first have difficulty with the harsh Dutch sounds, while the Dutch who learn Malay after their youth never pronounce it as well or as easily as they pronounce French. The few Javanese, even those of highest rank, who acquired the Dutch language and attempted to use it in conversation with officials, used to be bruskly answered in Malay, an implication that the superior language was reserved for Europeans only. This helped the conquerors to keep the distinctions sharply drawn between them and their subject people, and while they could always understand what the natives were saying, the Dutch were free to talk together without reserve in the presence of servants or princes. Dutch is now taught in the schools for natives maintained by the colonial government, 201 primary schools having been opened in 1887, with an attendance of 39,707 pupils. The higher schools at Batavia have been opened to the sons of native officials and such rich Javanese as can afford them, and conservatives lament the “spoiling” of the natives with all that the government now does for them. They complain that the Javanese are becoming too “independent” since schoolmasters, independent planters, and tourists came, just as the old-style foreign residents of India, the Straits, China, and Japan bemoan the progressive tendencies and upheavals of this era of Asiatic awakening and enlightenment; and tourist travel is always harped upon as the most offending and corrupting cause of the changes in the native spirit.

Once above the general level of low-lying rice-lands, cacao-plantations succeeded one another for miles beyond Depok; the small trees hung full of fat pods just ripening into reddish brown and crimson. The air was noticeably cooler in the hills, and as the shadows lengthened the near green mountains began to tower in shapes of lazuli mist, and a sky of soft, surpassing splendor made ready for its sunset pageant. When we left the train we were whirled through the twilight of great avenues of trees to the hotel, and given rooms whose veranda overhung a strangely rustling, shadowy abyss, where we could just discern a dark silver line of river leading to the pale-yellow west, with the mountain mass of Salak cut in gigantic purple silhouette.

The ordinary bedroom of a Java hotel, with latticed doors and windows, contains one or two beds, each seven feet square, hung with starched muslin curtains that effectually exclude the air, as well as lizards or winged things. The bedding, as at Singapore, consists of a hard mattress with a sheet drawn over it, a pair of hard pillows, and a long bolster laid down the middle as a cooling or dividing line. Blankets or other coverings are unneeded and unknown, but it takes one a little time to become acclimated to that order in the penetrating dampness of the dewy and reeking hours before dawn. If one makes protest enough, a thin blanket will be brought, but so camphorated and mildew-scented as to be insupportable. Pillows are not stuffed with feathers, but with the cooler, dry, elastic down of the straight-armed cotton-tree, which one sees growing everywhere along the highways, its rigid, right-angled branches inviting their use as the regulation telegraph-pole. The floors are made of a smooth, hard cement, which harbors no insects, and can be kept clean and cool. Pieces of coarse ratan matting are the only floor-coverings used, and give an agreeable contrast to the dirty felts, dhurries, and carpets, the patches of wool and cotton and matting, spread over the earth or wooden floors of the unspeakable hotels of British India. And yet the Javanese hotels are disappointing to those who know the solid comforts and immaculate order of certain favorite hostelries of The Hague and Amsterdam. Everything is done to secure a free circulation of air, as a room that is closed for a day gets a steamy, mildewed atmosphere, and if closed for three days blooms with green mold over every inch of its walls and floors. The section of portico outside each room at Buitenzorg was decently screened off to serve as a private sitting-room for each guest or family in the hours of startling dishabille; and as soon as the sun went down a big hanging-lamp assembled an entomological congress. Every hotel provides as a night-lamp for the bedroom a tumbler with an inch of cocoanut-oil, and a tiny tin and cork arrangement for floating a wick on its surface. For the twelve hours of pitch-darkness this little lightning-bug contrivance burns steadily, emitting a delicious nutty fragrance, and allowing one to watch the unpleasant shadows of the lizards running over the walls and bed-curtains, and to look for the larger, poisonous brown gecko, whose unpleasant voice calling “Becky! Becky! Becky!” in measured gasps, six times, over and over again, is the actual, material nightmare of the tropics.

British tourists, unmindful of the offending of their own India in more vital matters, berate and scorn the tiny water-pitcher and basin of the Java hotels, brought from the continent of Europe unchanged; and rage at the custom of guests in Java hotels emptying their basins out of doors or windows on tropical shrubbery or courtyard pavings at will. There are swimming-pools at some hotels and in many private houses, but the usual bath-room of the land offers the traveler a barrel and a dipper. One is expected to ladle the water out and dash it over him in broken doses, and as the swimming-pool is a rinsing-tub for the many, the individual is besought not to use soap. Naturally the British tourist’s invectives are deep and loud and long, and he will not believe that the dipper-bath is more cooling than to soak and soap and scour in a comfortable tub of his own. He will not be silenced or comforted in this tubless tropical land, which, if it had only remained under British rule, might be—would be—etc. All suffering tourists agree with him, however, that the worst laundering in the world befalls one’s linen in Java, the cloth-destroying, button-exterminating dhobie man of Ceylon and India being a careful and conscientious artist beside the clothes-pounder of Java. In making the great circle of the earth westward one leaves the last of laundry luxury at Singapore, and continues to suffer until, in the sub-stratum of French civilization in Egypt, he finds the blanchisseuse.

The order of living is the same at the up-country hotels as at Batavia, and the charges are the same everywhere in Java, averaging about three dollars gold each day, everything save wine included; and at Buitenzorg corkage was charged on the bottle of filtered water which a dyspeptic tourist manufactured with a patent apparatus he carried with him. Landlords do not recognize nor deal with fractions of days, if they can help it, in charging one for board on this “American plan”; but when that reckless royal tourist, the King of Siam, makes battle over his Java hotel bills, lesser travelers may well take courage and follow his example. The King of Siam has erected commemorative columns crowned with white marble elephants, as souvenirs of his visits to Singapore and Batavia, and after the king’s financial victory over Buitenzorg and Garoet hotels, the tourist sees the white elephant as a symbol of victory more personally and immediately significant than the lion on the Waterloo column. It has been said that “no invalid nor dyspeptic should enter the portals of a Java hotel,” and this cannot be insisted upon too strongly, to deter any such sufferers from braving the sunrise breakfasts and bad coffee, the heavy riz tavel, and the long-delayed dinner-hour, solely for the sake of tropical scenery and vegetation, and a study of Dutch colonial life.

VI
A DUTCH SANS SOUCI

At daylight we saw that our portico looked full upon the front of Mount Salak, green to the very summit with plantations and primeval forests. Deep down below us lay a valley of Eden, where thousands of palm-trees were in constant motion, their branches bending, swaying, and fluttering as softly as ostrich-plumes to the eye, but with a strange, harsh, metallic rustle and clash, different from the whispers and sighs and cooing sounds of temperate foliage. As stronger winds threshed the heavy leaves, the level of the valley rippled and tossed in green billows like a barley-field. There was a basket village on the river-bank, where tropic life went on in as plain pantomime as in any stage presentation. At sunrise the people came out of their fragile toy houses, stretched their arms to the sky and yawned, took a swim in the river, and then gathered in the dewy shade to eat their morning curry and rice from their plantain-leaf plates. Then the baskets and cooking-utensils were held in the swift-flowing stream,—such a fastidious, ideal, adorable sort of dish-washing!—and the little community turned to its daily vocations. The men went away to work, or sat hammering and hewing with implements strangely Japanese, and held in each instance in the Japanese way. The women pounded and switched clothing to and fro in the stream, and spread it out in white and brilliant-colored mosaics on the bank to dry. They plaited baskets and painted sarongs, and the happy brown children, in nature’s dress, rolled at play under the cocoanut-trees, or splashed like young frogs in and out of the stream.

MOUNT SALAK, FROM THE RESIDENT’S GARDEN, BUITENZORG.

While this went on below, and we watched the dark indigo mass of Salak turning from purple and azure to sunlit greens in the light of early day, the breakfast of the country was brought to our porch: cold toast, cold meats, eggs, fruit, tea or the very worst coffee in all the world—something that even the American railway restaurant and frontier hotel would spurn with scorn. Java coffee, in Java, comes to one in a stoppered glass bottle or cruet, a dark-brown fluid that might as well be walnut catsup, old port, or New Orleans molasses. This double extract of coffee, made by cold filtration, is diluted with hot water and hot milk to a muddy, gray-brown, lukewarm drink, that is uniformly bad in every hotel and public place of refreshment that a tourist encounters on the island. In private houses, where the fine Arabian berry is toasted and powdered, and the extract made fresh each day, the morning draught is quite another fluid, and worthy the cachet the name of Java gives to coffee in far countries.

Buitenzorg, the Bogor of the natives, who will not call it by its newer name, is one of the enchanted spots where days can slip by in dateless delight; one forgets the calendar and the flight of time, and hardly remembers the heavy, sickening heat of Batavia stewing away on the plains below. It is the Versailles of the island, the seat of the governor-general’s court, and the social life of the colony, a resort for officials and the leisure class, and for invalids and the delicate, who find strength in the clear, fresh air of the hills, the cool nights, and the serenely tempered days, each with its reviving shower the year round. Buitenzorg is the Simla of Netherlands India, but it awaits its Kipling to record its social life in clear-cut, instantaneous pictures. There are strange pictures for the Kipling to sketch, too, since the sarong and the native jacket are as much the regular morning dress for ladies at the cool, breezy hill-station as in sweltering Batavia, a fact rather disproving the lowland argument that the heat demands such extraordinary concessions in costume. But as that “Bengal Civilian” who wrote “De Zieke Reiziger; or, Rambles in Java in 1852,” and commented so freely upon Dutch costume, cuisine, and Sabbath-keeping, succeeded, Mr. Money said, in shutting every door to the English traveler for years afterward, and added extra annoyances to the toelatings-kaart system, budding and alien Kiplings may take warning.

The famous Botanical Garden at Buitenzorg is the great show-place, the paradise and pride of the island. The Dutch are acknowledgedly the best horticulturists of Europe, and with the heat of a tropical sun, a daily shower, and nearly a century’s well-directed efforts, they have made Buitenzorg’s garden first of its kind in the world, despite the rival efforts of the French at Saigon, and of the British at Singapore, Ceylon, Calcutta, and Jamaica. The governor-general’s palace, greatly enlarged from the first villa of 1744, is in the midst of the ninety-acre inclosure reached from the main gate, near the hotel and the passer, by what is undoubtedly the finest avenue of trees in the world. These graceful kanari-trees, arching one hundred feet overhead in a great green cathedral aisle, have tall, straight trunks covered with stag-horn ferns, bird’s-nest ferns, ratans, creeping palms, blooming orchids, and every kind of parasite and air-plant the climate allows; and there is a fairy lake of lotus and Victoria regia beside it, with pandanus and red-stemmed Banka palms crowded in a great sheaf or bouquet on a tiny islet. When one rides through this green avenue in the dewy freshness of the early morning, it seems as though nature and the tropics could do no more, until he has penetrated the tunnels of waringen-trees, the open avenues of royal palms, the great plantation of a thousand palms, the grove of tree-fern, and the frangipani thicket, and has reached the knoll commanding a view of the double summit of Gedeh and Pangerango, vaporous blue volcanic heights, from one peak of which a faint streamer of smoke perpetually floats. There is a broad lawn at the front of the palace, shaded with great waringen-, sausage-, and candle-trees, and trees whose branches are hidden in a mantle of vivid-leafed bougainvillea vines, with deer wandering and grouping themselves in as correct park pictures as if under branches of elm or oak, or beside the conventional ivied trunks of the North.

It is a tropical experience to reverse an umbrella and in a few minutes fill it with golden-hearted white frangipani blossoms, or to find nutmegs lying as thick as acorns on the ground, and break their green outer shell and see the fine coral branches of mace enveloping the dark kernel. It is a delight, too, to see mangosteens and rambutans growing, to find bread, sausages, and candles hanging in plenty from benevolent trees, and other fruits and strange flowers springing from a tree’s trunk instead of from its branches. There are thick groves and regular avenues of the waringen, a species of Ficus, and related to the banian- and the rubber-tree, a whole family whose roots crawl above the ground, drop from the branches and generally comport themselves in unconventional ways. Bamboos grow in clumps and thickets, ranging from the fine, feathery-leafed canes, that are really only large grasses, up to the noble giants from Burma, whose stems are more nearly trunks easily soaring to a hundred feet in air, and spreading there a solid canopy of graceful foliage.

The creepers run from tree to tree, and writhe over the ground like gray serpents; ratans and climbing palms one hundred feet in length are common, while uncommon ones stretch to five hundred feet. There is one creeper with a blossom like a magnified white violet, and with all a wood-violet’s fragrance; but with only Dutch and botanical names on the labels, one wanders ignorantly and protestingly in this paradise of strange things. The rarer orchids are grown in matted sheds in the shade of tall trees; and although we saw them at the end of the dry season, and few plants were in bloom, there was still an attractive orchid-show.

But the strangest, most conspicuous bloom in that choice corner was a great butterfly flower of a pitcher-plant (a nepenthes), whose pale-green petals were veined with velvety maroon, and half concealed the pelican pouch of a pitcher filled with water. It was an evil-looking, ill-smelling, sticky thing, and its unusual size and striking colors made it haunt one longest of all vegetable marvels. There were other more attractive butterflies fluttering on pliant stems, strange little woolly white orchids, like edelweiss transplanted, and scores of delicate Java and Borneo orchids, not so well known as the Venezuelan and Central American orchids commonly grown in American hothouses, and so impossible to acclimate in Java.

Lady Raffles died while Sir Stamford was governor of Java, and was buried in the section of the palace park that was afterward (in 1817) set apart as a botanical garden, and the care of the little Greek temple over her grave near the kanari avenue was provided for in a special clause in the treaty of cession. The bust of Theismann, who founded the garden and added so much to botanical knowledge by his studies in Java and Borneo, stands in an oval pleasance called the rose-garden; and there one may take heart and boast of the temperate zone, since that rare exotic, the rose, is but a spindling bush, and its blossoming less than scanty at Buitenzorg, when one remembers California’s, and more especially Tacoma’s, perennial prodigalities in showers of roses. In 1895 Professor Lotsy of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, was called to assist the learned curator, Dr. Treub, in the management of this famous Hortus Bogoriensis, which provides laboratory and working-space for, and invites foreign botanists freely to avail themselves of, this unique opportunity of study. Over one hundred native gardeners tend and care for this great botanic museum of more than nine thousand living specimens, all working under the direction of a white head-gardener. The Tjiliwong River separates the botanic garden from a culture-garden of forty acres, where seventy more gardeners look to the economic plants—the various cinchonas, sugar-canes, rubber, tea, coffee, gums, spices, hemp, and other growths, whose introduction to the colony has so benefited the planters. Experiments in acclimatization are carried on in the culture-garden, and at the experimental garden at Tjibodas, high up on the slopes of Salak, where the governor-general has a third palace, and there is a government hospital and sanatorium.

Theismann’s famous museum of living twig- and leaf-insects was abandoned some years ago, the curator deciding to keep his garden strictly to botanical lines. One no longer has the pleasure of seeing there those curious and most extraordinary freaks of nature—the fresh green or dry and dead-looking twigs that suddenly turn their heads or bend their long angular legs and move away; or leaves, as delusive in their way, that detach themselves from a tree-branch and fly away. These insects bearing so astonishing a resemblance to their environment may be purchased now and then from Chinese gardeners; but otherwise, if one asks where they can be found or seen, there comes the usual answer, “In Borneo or Celebes,”—always on the farther, remoter islands,—tropic wonders taking wing like the leaf-insects when one reaches their reputed haunts.

All Java is in a way as finished as little Holland itself, the whole island cultivated from edge to edge like a tulip-garden, and connected throughout its length with post-roads smooth and perfect as park drives, all arched with waringen-, kanari-, tamarind-, or teak-trees. The rank and tangled jungle is invisible, save by long journeys; and great snakes, wild tigers, and rhinoceroses are almost unknown now. One must go to Borneo and the farther islands to see them, too. All the valleys, plains, and hillsides are planted in formal rows, hedged, terraced, banked, drained, and carefully weeded as a flower-bed. The drives are of endless beauty, whichever way one turns from Buitenzorg, and we made triumphal progresses through the kanari- and waringen-lined streets in an enormous “milord.” The equipage measured all of twenty feet from the tip of the pole to the footman’s perch behind, and with a cracking whip and at a rattling gait we dashed through shady roads, past Dutch barracks and hospitals, over picturesque bridges, and through villages where the native children jumped and clapped their hands with glee as the great Juggernaut vehicle rolled by. We visited the grave of Raden Saleh, a lonely little pavilion or temple in a tangle of shrubbery that was once a lovely garden shaded by tall cocoa-palms; and we drove to Batoe Toelis, “the place of the written stone,” and in the little thatched basket of a temple saw the sacred stone inscribed in ancient Kawi characters, the original classic language of the Javanese. In another basket shrine were shown the veritable footprints of Buddha, with no explanation as to how and when he rested on the island, nor yet how he happened to have such long, distinctively Malay toes. Near these temples is the villa where the poor African prince of Ashantee was so long detained in exile—an African chief whose European education had turned his mind to geology and natural sciences, and who led the life of a quiet student here until, by the exchange from Dutch to British ownership of Ashantee, a way was opened for him to return and die in his own country. There is a magnificent view from the Ashantee villa out over a great green plain and a valley of palms to the peaks of Gedeh and Pangerango, and to their volcanic neighbor, Salak, silent for two hundred years. Peasants, trooping along the valley roads far below, made use of a picturesque bamboo bridge that is accounted one of the famous sights of the neighborhood, and seemed but processions of ants crossing a spider’s web. All the suburban roads are so many botanical exhibitions approaching that in the great garden, and one’s interest is claimed at every yard and turn.

FRANGIPANI AND SAUSAGE-TREE.

It takes a little time for the temperate mind to accept the palm-tree as a common, natural, and inevitable object in every outlook and landscape; to realize that the joyous, living thing with restless, perpetually threshing foliage is the same correct, symmetrical, motionless feather-duster on end that one knows in the still life of hothouses and drawing-rooms at home; to realize that it grows in the ground, and not in a pot or tub to be brought indoors for the winter season. The arches of gigantic kanari-trees growing over by-lanes and village paths, although intended for triumphal avenues and palace driveways, overpower one with the mad extravagance, the reckless waste, and the splendid luxury of nature. One cannot accept these things at first as utilities, just as it shocks one to have a servant black his shoes with bruised hibiscus flowers or mangosteen rind, or remove rust from kris- or knife-blades with pineapple-juice, thrusting a blade through and through the body of the pine. The poorest may have his hedge of lantana, which, brought from the Mauritius by Lady Raffles, now borders roads, gardens, and the railway-tracks from end to end of the island. The humblest dooryard may be gay with tall poinsettia-trees, and bougainvilleas may pour a torrent of magenta leaves from every tree, wall, or roof. The houses of the great planters around Buitenzorg are ideal homes in the tropics, and the Tjomson and other large tea and coffee estates are like parks. The drives through their grounds show one the most perfect lawns and flower-beds and ornamental trees, vines, and palms, and such ranks on ranks of thriving tea-bushes and coffee-bushes, every leaf perfect and without flaw, every plant in even line, and the warm red earth lying loosely on their roots, that one feels as if in some ornamental jardin d’acclimatation rather than among the most staple and serious crops of commerce. Yet from end to end of the island the cultivation is as intense and careful, entitling Java to its distinction as “the finest tropical island in the world.” It is the gem of the Indies, the one splendid jewel in the Netherlands crown, and a possession to which poor Cuba, although corresponding exactly to it geographically and politically, has been vainly compared.

There were often interesting table d’hôte companies gathered at noon and at night in the long dining-room of the Buitenzorg hotel. While many of the Dutch officials and planters, and their wives, maintained the wooden reserve and supercilious air of those uncertain folk of the half-way strata in society everywhere, there were others whose intelligence and courtesy and friendly interest remain as green spots in the land. There was one most amiable man, who, we thought, in his love of country, was anxious to hear us praise it. We extolled the cool breezes and the charming day, and said: “You have a beautiful country here.”

“This is not my country,” he answered.

“But are you not Dutch?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Then Java is yours. It is the Netherlands even if it is India.”

“Yes; but I am from East Java, near Malang”—a section all of three hundred miles away, off at the other end of the island; but a strong distinction—an extreme aloofness or estrangement—exists between residents of East, West, and Middle Java, and between those of this island and of the near-by Sumatra, Celebes, and Molucca, all Indonesians as they are, under the rule of the one governor-general of Netherlands India, representing the little queen at The Hague.

Often when we spoke of “India” or “southern India,” or referred to Delhi and Bombay as “cities of India,” the Hollanders looked puzzled.

“Ah, when you say ‘India,’ you mean Hindustan or British India?”

“Certainly; that is India, the continent—the greater India.”

“But what, then, do you call this island and all the possessions of the Netherlands out here?”

“Why, we speak of this island as Java. Every one knows of it, and of Sumatra and Borneo, by their own names.”

The defender of Netherlands India said nothing; but soon a reference was made to a guest who had been in official residence at Amboyna.

“Where?” we inquired with keen interest in the unknown.

“Amboyna. Do you in America not know of Amboyna?”

Average Americans must confess if, since early geography days, they have not remembered carefully that one tiny island in the group of Moluccas off the east end of Java—an island so tiny that even on the school atlases used in Buitenzorg it is figured the size of a pea, and on the maps for the rest of the world is but a nameless dot in the clustered dots of the group that would better be named the Nutmeg Isles, since the bulk of the world’s supply of that spicy fruit comes from their shores.

Then, away down there, out of the world, I was taken to task for that chief sin and offending of my country against other countries—the McKinley Bill of so long ago.

“Why, we couldn’t make any money out of tobacco while such a law was in existence,” said one Sumatra planter.

“But we are concerned with the prosperity of our own American tobacco-growers. It is for the Dutch government to make laws to benefit the tobacco-planters of Sumatra.”

“Ah! but you have new and better laws now since that last revolution in the States, and we are all planting all the tobacco we can. We shall be very prosperous now.”

VII
IN A TROPICAL GARDEN

The Buitenzorg passer proper is housed in a long, tiled pavilion facing an open common, on which the country folk gather with their produce twice a week, and, overflowing, stretch in a scattering encampment down the broad street leading from the gate of the Botanical Garden. The permanent passer, or regular bazaar in the covered building, is stocked with the staples and substantials of life, and is open every day. The town tailors have their abode under that cover, and squat in rows before their little American hand-sewing machines, and sew the single seam of a sarong skirt, or reel off a native jacket, while the customer waits. It is the semi-weekly, early morning, outdoor market of chattering country folk that most delights and diverts a stranger, however. The lines of venders, strung along the shady street and grouped under palm-patched umbrellas in the open, provide horticultural and floral exhibits of the greatest interest, and afford the most picturesque scenes of native life. The long street of the Tjina kampong beyond is dull and monotonous by comparison, for when Dutch rules force the Chinese to be clean and orderly all picturesqueness and character are gone from their quarter. All the tasseled lanterns and strips of vermilion paper will not “tell” artistically without their concomitant grease and dirt.

As a very new broom, a clever child pleased with the toy of a new employer, Amat, our mild-mannered Moslem servant, was a treasure and delight during those first days at Buitenzorg. He entered gleefully into the spirit of our reckless purchase from the heaps of splendid fruits poured from the great horn of plenty into the open passer. He gave us the name of each particular strange fruit, taught us the odd tricks and sleight-of-hand methods of opening these novelties of the market-place; and it was quite like kindergarten play when he unbraided and wove together again the ribbed palm-leaf reticules in which dukus and such small fruits are sold. We carried baskets of strange fruits back to the hotel, and Amat added every vegetable curio and market’s marvel he could find to the heaps of fruits and flowers. Our veranda was a testing- and proving-ground, and there seemed to be no end to the delights and surprises the tropics provided.

TROPICAL FRUITS.

Tons of bananas were heaped high in the passer each day, the great golden bunches making most decorative and attractive masses of color, and their absurd cheapness tempting one to buy and to buy. The Java pisang, or banana, however, is but a coarse plantain with a pinkish-yellow, dry pulp, of a pumpkiny flavor that sadly disappoints the palate. Yet it is nature’s greatest and most generously bestowed gift in the tropics, and it was pleasant to eat it picked ripe in its native home, instead of receiving it steam-ripened from Northern fruiterers’ warehouses. Every tiny village and almost every little native hut in Java has its banana-patch or its banana-tree, which requires nothing of labor in cultivation, save the weeding away of the old stalks. It was intended as a humane concentration of benefits when nature gave man this food-plant, four thousand pounds of whose fruit will grow with so little human aid in the same space of ground required to raise ninety-nine pounds of potatoes or thirty-three pounds of wheat; both those Northern crops acquired, too, only by incessant sweat of the brow and muscular exertion. The pisang is the tropical staff of life for whites as well as natives, as wholesome and necessary as bread, and an equivalent for the latter as a starchy food. It comes to one with the earliest breakfast cup, appears at every meal, arrives with the afternoon tea-tray, and always ends the late dinner as the inevitable accompaniment of cheese, the happiest substitute for bread or biscuits, tropical gourmets insist.

The lovely red rambutans (Nephelium lappaceum) we would have bought for their beauty alone—those clusters of seemingly green chestnut-burs, with spines tinted to the deepest rose, affording the most exquisite color-study of all the fruits in the passer. The spiny shell pulls apart easily, and discloses a juicy, half-transparent mass of white pulp around a central core of smooth stones. The duku, looking like a big green grape, a fresh almond, or an olive, contains just such another ball of pulp within its leathery rind, and both fruits much resemble the fresh lychees of China in flavor. The salak, or “forbidden fruit,” is a hard, scaly, pear-shaped thing, which very appropriately grows on a prickly bush, and whose strange brown rind reminds one of a pine-cone or a rattlesnake’s skin. This scaly, snaky shell prejudices one against it; but the salak is as solid as an apple, with a nutty flavor and texture. It is not unpleasant, nor is it distinctively anything in flavor—nothing unique or delicious enough to make one seek hard or long for a second taste of it. The jamboa, the eugenia or rose-apple (Eugenia malaccensis), is a fruit of the same size and shape as the salak, and in spite of its exquisite coloring it impresses one as being an albino, a skinless or some other monstrous and unnatural product of nature. Its outer integument, thinner than any nectarine’s rind, shades from snow-white at the stem to the deepest rose-pink at the blossom end, and it looks as if it were the most fragrant, delicious, and juicy fruit. One bites into the fine, crisp, succulent pulp, and tastes exactly nothing, and never forgives the beautiful, rose-tinted, watery blank for its deluding. The carambola (Averrhoa), the five-ribbed yellow “star-fruit,” popularly known in real Cathay as the “Chinese gooseberry,” is a favorite, fragrant study in spherical geometry, and the cutting apart of its triangular sections is the nicest sort of after-dinner amusement and demonstration; but its fine, deliciously acid pulp is usually known to one before he reaches Java. Its relative, the bilimbi, is the sharpest of acid fruits, and lends an edge to chutneys and curried conglomerates.

The breadfruit and its gigantic relative, the nanko (Artocarpus integrifolia), or jackfruit, which often weighs thirty and even forty pounds, and is sufficient load for a man to bring to market on his back, are the vegetable mainstays of native life; but as both must be cooked to a tasteless mush to be relished, one is satisfied only to look at them in the passer. That swollen monstrosity, the nanko, grows goiter-like on the trunk of a tree, and is supported in ratan slings while the great excrescence ripens. One must speak of the breadfruit with respect, though, after all that scientists have said, philosophers and political economists have argued, concerning it. Since ten breadfruit-trees will support a large family the year round, and a man may plant that many within an hour and need give them no further care, Captain Cook observed that such a man has then “as completely fulfilled his duty to his own and future generations as the native of our less genial climate by plowing in the cold of winter and reaping in the summer heat as often as the seasons return.”

The prickly durian (Durio Zibethinus), which is almost as large as the nanko, has a pulp a little like that of a cantaloup melon, only smoother and more solid—a thick, creamy, “almondy-buttery” custard, which is agreeable to the palate, but offends the nose with an odor of onion and stale egg. It is spoken of with bitterness and contempt by most Europeans, is extolled as “the king and emperor of fruits” by Wallace and a few other intrepid ones, and the little English children in Java, who all are fond of it, call it “darling durian.” In 1599 Linschott declared it to surpass in flavor “all the other fruits of the world.” Crawfurd said that it tasted like “fresh cream and filberts,” a description which conjures up the cloying modern fantasia of English-walnut kernels in a mayonnaise. Another great one has said that “to eat durians is a new sensation worth a voyage to the East to experience”; and Dr. Ward, in his “Medical Topography of the Straits,” says: “Those who overcome the prejudice excited by the disagreeable, fetid odor of the external shell reckon it delicious. From experience I can pronounce it the most luscious and the most fascinating fruit in the universe; the pulp covering the seeds, the only part eaten, excels the finest custards which could be prepared by either Ude or Kitchener.” One sees the monster retailed in segments in every passer; the natives are always munching it inconveniently to windward of one, and they not only praise it, but write poems to it, and respectfully salute the tree they see it growing on. This fruit of discordant opinions hangs high upon a tall tree, and is never picked, but allowed to fall to the ground when it becomes perfectly ripe. A falling durian is justly dreaded and guarded against by the natives, who tell of men whose shoulders have been lacerated and heads half crushed by the sudden descent of one of these great green cannon-balls. Its unpleasant odor is said to come with age, and they tell one that a freshly fallen durian is free from such objection; but the watched durian never falls, I found, after maintaining the attitude of the fox toward the grapes for a reasonable time before a durian-tree.

The papaya, a smaller custard-fruit, with unpleasant little curly gray seeds in the mess, is like a coarse, flavorless melon, but is highly extolled as a febrifuge and tonic. The much-heralded and disappointing cherimoyer is grown too, and mangos ripen in every yard; but the Java mangos are coarse and turpentiny, of a deep pumpkiny hue. Pineapples, the nanas, or Portuguese ananassa, grow to perfection all over the low, hot country; but one is warned to be careful in eating them, and they are called the most dangerous, the most choleraic and fever-causing of tropical fruits. The native orange on this south side of the equator is not orange at all, even when ripe, but its peel is a deep, dark, beautiful green, and its flavor unequaled. The big Citrus decumana, the pomelo of China, the pumplemoos of Java, the Batavian lime in British India, the shaddock of the West Indies, and the grapefruit of Florida, appears in the passers, but is coarse, dry, and tasteless, save for the turpentine flavor, which does not lurk within, but stalks abroad.

The fruit of fruits, the prize of the Indies and of all the Malay equatorial regions, where the tree is indigenous, is the mangosteen (Garcinia mangosteen), and the tourist should avail himself of November and December as the months for a tour in Java, if only to know the mangosteen in its perfection. The dark-purple apples hang from the tall trees by woody stems, and the natives bring the manggis to market tied together in bunches of twenties like clusters of gigantic grapes. It is delight enough to the eye alone to cut the thick, fibrous rind, bisect the perfect sphere at the equator line, and see the round ball of “perfumed snow” resting intact in its rose-lined cup. The five white segments separate easily, and may be lifted whole with a fork, and they melt on the tongue with a touch of tart and a touch of sweet; one moment a memory of the juiciest, most fragrant apple, at another a remembrance of the smoothest cream ice, the most exquisite and delicately flavored fruit-acid known—all the delights of nature’s laboratory condensed in that ball of neige parfumée. It is fortunate that the mangosteen is a harmless and wholesome fruit, and that one may eat with impunity, laying store for a lifetime in his one opportunity. I often wondered how it would be if the mangosteen were a dangerous or a forbidden fruit; if it were wicked or a little of a sin to eat it; if mangosteens could be obtained singly, at great risk or expense; or if they should be prescribed for one as a tonic, something antimalarial, a substitute for quinine, to be taken in doses of one, two, or ten before or after each meal. The mangosteen cannot be transported to the temperate zone of Europe,—not even with the aid of modern ships’ refrigerating-machines and when coated with wax,—as in less than a week after leaving the trees the pulp melts away to a brown mass. By the alternation of seasons the mangosteen is always in market at Singapore, as it ripens north of the equator during the summer six months of the northern hemisphere’s year, and during this rainy season of Cochin China is carried from Saigon successfully as far north as Shanghai and Yokohama. The offer by the leading British steamship company of thirty pounds sterling to the ship-captain who will get a basket of mangosteens to the Queen is still open. The tree grows throughout the Malay Peninsula and Archipelago, and groves have been successfully planted in Ceylon, so that there is hope that this incomparable fruit may finally be acclimated in the West Indies, and fast steamers make it known in New York and London. The mangosteen is tinned for export at Singapore; but the faded segments floating in tasteless syrup give one little idea of this peerless fruit in its natural state.

TROPICAL FRUITS.

It had been my particular haunting dream of the tropics to have a small black boy climb a tree and throw cocoanuts down to me; and while we sat admiring the rank beauty of the deserted garden around Raden Saleh’s tomb, one afternoon, the expression of the wish caused a full-grown Malay to saunter across the grass, and, cigarette in mouth, walk up the straight palm-stem as easily as a fly. The Malay toes are as distinct members as the fingers, and almost as long; and clasping the trunk with the sole of the foot at each leaf-scar, that Malay climber gripped the rough palm-stem as firmly with his toes as with claws or extra fingers. It was so easily and commonly done that palm-tree climbing soon ceased to be any more of a feat to watch than berry-picking; but the first native who walked up a palm-tree for my benefit held me rapt, attentive, while he picked the big nuts and sent twenty-pounders crashing down through the shrubbery. We paid him well, and carried two of the nuts home with us; and from them the servant brought us tall glasses, or schooners, filled with the clear, colorless, tasteless milk, and a plate full of a white, leathery stuff—tough, tasteless too, and wilted, like cold omelet without eggs—the saddest sort of a feast of fresh cocoanuts.

We found all the countless common fragrant flowers that are so necessary to these esthetic, perfume-loving people heaped for sale in the flower-market of the passer, along with the oils and the gums and spices that give out, and burn with, such delicious odors. Short-stemmed roses and heaps of loose rose-petals were laid on beds of green moss or in bits of palm-leaf in a way to delight one’s color-sense, and, with the mounds of pale-green petals of the kananga, or ylang-ylang-tree’s blossoms, filled the whole air with fragrance. We dried quantities of kananga flowers for sachets, as they will crisp even in the damp air of Java, and retain their spicy fragrance for years; but the exquisite white-and-gold “Bo-flowers,” the sacred sumboja or frangipani (the Plumeria acutifolia of the botanists), would not dry, but turned dark and mildewed wherever one petal fell upon another. This lovely blossom of Buddha is sticky and unpleasant to the touch when pulled from the tree, and the stem exudes a thick milk. After they have fallen to the ground they may be handled more easily, and fallen flowers retain the spotless, waxen perfection of their thick, fleshy petals for even two days. One wonders that the people do not more often wear these flowers of the golden heart in their black hair; but the sumboja is a religious flower in Java, as in India, and in Buddhist times was almost as much an attribute and symbol of that great faith as the oltus. This Bo-flower is still the favorite offering, together with the champaka, or Arabian jasmine, in the Buddhist temples of Burma and Ceylon, and is often laid before the few images of that old religion now remaining in Java. All through the Malay world, however, it is especially the flower of the dead, associated everywhere with funeral rites and graves, as conventional an expression or accompaniment of grief, death, and burial as the cypress and the weeping willow. For this reason one rarely sees it used as an ornamental tree or hedge, even in a European’s garden or pleasure-grounds, and its presence in hedges or copses indicates that there are graves, or one of Islam’s little open-timbered temples of the dead, within reach of its entrancing fragrance. Our Malay servant would never accept our name of “frangipani” when told to spread out or stir the petals we tried to dry in the sun. He stoically repeated the native “sumboja” after me each time, very rightly resenting the baptism in honor of an Italian marquis, who only compounded an essence imitating the perfume of the West Indian red jasmine, which breathes a little of the cloying sweetness of the peerless sumboja. After but a few trials of its syllables, “sumboja” soon expressed to me more of the fragrance, the sentiment and spirit, of the lovely death-flower than ever could the word “frangipani.” Chinese Buddhists seem not to have any traditions or associations with the Bo-flower, as in South China, where the tree is grown in gardens, it is only the kai tan fa, or “egg-flower,” those hideously matter-of-fact people noting only the resemblance of the lovely petals to the contrasting yolk and albumen of a hard-boiled egg.

VIII
THE “CULTURE SYSTEM”

While the Dutch East India Company held the monopoly of trade and production in Java, farmed out the revenues, and exacted forced labor and forced delivery of produce, this tropical possession yielded an enormous revenue. With the company’s monopoly of trade with Japan, and only Portugal as Holland’s great rival in the ports of China, the company made Amsterdam the tea- and spice-market and the center of Oriental trade in Europe. The early Dutch traders not only cut down all the spice-trees on the Molucca Islands, and forbade the planting of clove-, cinnamon-, and nutmeg-trees, save on certain Dutch islands, but they burned tons of spices in the streets of Amsterdam, in order to maintain prices in Europe and realize their usual profit of three hundred per cent.

The Dutch East India Company acquired control of Java through pioneer preëmption, purchase, conquest, strategy, and crooked diplomacy, and, finally, as residuary legatee by the will of the Mohammedan emperor at Solo. The company then claimed the same sovereign rights over the people as the native rulers, who had exacted one fifth of the peasant’s labor and one fifth of his crops as ground-rent, the land being all the inalienable property of the princes. When the colony passed from the company to the crown of Holland, Marshal Daendels at once turned such feudal rights to profitable account and instituted public works on a great scale. With such forced labor he built the great double post-road over the island from Anjer Head to Banjoewangi,—that road upon whose building twenty thousand miserable lives were expended,—so that difficulty of communication no longer interfered with the delivery of products at government warehouses on the sea-shore. He further established government teak- and coffee-plantations, but the natives who were forced to cultivate them were no more tyrannized over nor oppressed than they had been under their own princes, the change of masters making small difference in their condition. Previous to Daendels’s time all the coffee came from the Preangers, whose princes, having yielded their territories by treaty in the middle of the last century, retained sovereignty and their old land-revenues on condition of paying the Dutch East India Company an annual tribute in coffee, and after that selling the balance of the crop to the company at the fixed rate of three and a half florins the picul (133⅓ pounds).

Although the East India Company practically ended its rule in 1798, the States-General canceled the lease in 1800, and the colony passed to the crown of Holland, the same trade monopoly continued until the happy interval of British rule (1811-16), and there was a continual movement of natives from the Dutch to the native states up to 1811. Under Sir Stamford Raffles’s enlightened control the Java ports were made free to the ships of all nations, the peasants were given individual ownership of lands, great estates were bestowed upon native chiefs, and a bewildering doctrine of liberty and equality before the law was preached to the people. Free trade, free culture, and free labor were decreed at once. The same treaty of London (August, 1814) which restored Java to the Dutch (August, 1816), at the close of the Napoleonic wars, secured the freedom of the ports; but the Dutch quickly resumed the old system of land-tenure by village communities paying ground-rent in produce and labor through their wedana, or head man, who answered to a district chief, who in turn reported to the native prince acting as regent for the Dutch government. Dutch residents “advised” these native regents, who ruled wholly under their orders and were mere middlemen between the Dutch and the natives. These regents were always chosen from the greatest family of the province, and the Dutch contrôleurs directed the chiefs and wedanas. The Dutch retained the excellent British police and judicial system in the main, while having more regard for the native aristocracy, their prejudices and their laws of caste. British philanthropy had introduced the British India ryot system of separate property in the soil and a separate land-tax, along with equality of rights, duties, and imposts, while abolishing all monopolies, forced labor and productions. The natives, like true Orientals, preferred their own old communal land system, with yearly allotments of village lands and the just rotation of the best lands, to any modern system of individual property, and to what was most dreaded by the native, individual liability. The Dutch resumed the old land system, exacted the old one fifth of produce as land-rent, and obliged the peasants to plant one fifth of the village land in crops, to be sold to the government at fixed prices; but they only demanded one day’s labor in seven, instead of one day in five. The lands which Sir Stamford Raffles had given to the chiefs and petty princes soon passed into the hands of Europeans or Chinese; and except for this one tenth of the land held by private owners, and two tenths held by the Preanger regents, the rest of the island became crown land, subject to lease, but never to be sold. The Preanger princes resumed their payment of a revenue in coffee and the sale of the surplus crop to the government at a fixed price. Marshal Daendels’s plantations, so long neglected, were put in order again and cultivated by seventh-day labor. Each family was required to keep one thousand coffee-trees in bearing on village lands, to give two fifths of the crop to the government, and deliver it cleaned and sorted at government warehouses established all through the coffee districts.

But with the open ports, the abolition of the government’s spice monopoly in 1824, and the expenses of a protracted war with the native ruler of Middle Java (1817-30), the revenues still only met the expenses; and there was great concern in Holland at the decrease of the golden stream of Indian revenue, and consequent satisfaction in England that its statesmen had handed back the island, that might have proved only an embarrassment and intolerable expense instead of a profit to the British crown. The King of Holland had established and guaranteed the Netherlands Trading Company, which acted as the commission agent of the government in Europe, importing in its own ships exclusively, selling all the produce in Europe, and conducting a general business in the colony. The partial failure of this company, which obliged the king to meet the guaranteed interest, brought about a new order of things destined to increase the colonial trade and crown revenues.

A MARKET IN BUITENZORG.

As private enterprise could not make the Java trade what it had been, Governor Van den Bosch, who originated the “culture system” as a means of relieving the distressed finances, was sent out from Holland in 1830, with power to grant cash credits and make ten-year contracts with private individuals who would assist in developing the sugar industry. Sufficient advances were made to these colonists to enable them to erect sugar-mills and to maintain themselves until, by the sales of their products, they were able to repay the capital and own their mills. The government agreed that the natives of each community or district should grow sufficient sugar-cane on their lands to supply the mills’ capacity, and deliver it at the mills at fixed rates. The natives were obliged to plant one fifth of the village lands in sugar-cane, and each man to give one day’s labor in seven to tending the crop. The village head man was paid for the community three and a half florins for each picul of sugar made from their cane, and the natives who worked in the mills were paid regular wages. The mill-owner sold one third of the finished product of his mill to the government, at rates rising from eight to ten florins the picul; the mill-owner paid back each year one tenth of the government’s cash advanced to him in sugar at the same rate, and was then free to ship, as his own venture, the balance of his sugar to the Netherlands Trading Company, which held the monopoly of transport and sale of government produce. Enormous profits resulted to the government and mill-owners from the sales of such sugar in Europe, and during one prosperous decade the crown of Holland enjoyed a revenue amounting to more than five million dollars United States gold each year from its Java sugar sales. The whole east end of the island and the low, hot lands along the coast were green at their season with the giant grass whose cultivation has forced or encouraged slavery everywhere throughout the earth’s tropic belt. Slavery itself ceased in Java by royal edict in 1859, but sugar-culture went on under the admirable Van den Bosch system so profitably that mill-owners did not grumble at having to sell one third of their product to the government at a merely nominal price.

The great success in sugar led the government to extend the culture system’s method to other crops. Would-be colonists competed for such profitable contracts, and all young Holland cherished the ambition to sail away to the East and make fortunes on Java plantations. A choice was exercised to secure the best class of young men as colonists; education, cultivation, and gentlemanly manners were made essentials, and it was known that no absenteeism would be tolerated, that the planters were expected to settle in Java in permanence, and that leaves of absence would be granted during the ten-year contracts only for actual illness. By providing military bands and subsidizing an opera, by establishing libraries and fostering the museum of the Batavian Society, and by encouraging a liberal social life among the higher officials, everything was done to secure all the advantages of civilization and to make life tolerable in the far-away tropics.

Early experiments had been made with the tea-plant in Java, and the government initiated tea-growing with great anticipations. Tea-plants and -seeds were brought by botanists from Japan as early as 1826, and later from China, together with skilled cultivators and workmen to instruct the natives. Crown lands were leased on long terms, and cash advances made during the first years of hill-clearing and planting. The government obliged the planters to produce equal quantities of green and black tea, and four grades or qualities of each kind; the planters were to repay the government’s cash advances in tea, to sell the whole crop to the government at a fixed rate, and to pay the workmen fixed wages. Tea-growing was not profitable at first, as there was difficulty in securing a market in Europe for the bitter, weedy Java leaf, until, by a great reduction in the selling-price, its cheapness gained it a sale in Germany. The discovery of the wild Assam tea-plant in India, and the results obtained by grafting it on the Chinese plant, marked a new departure in tea-growing, and with better understanding of new methods and the aid of machinery in curing the leaf, tea-gardens became profitable ventures. After fostering the industry to success, the government refused further contracts after 1865, and the tea-planters were free to dispose of their crops as they wished. All through the hill-country of the Preangers tea-bushes stripe the rolling ground for miles, and new ground is being cleared and leased each season. Java teas have greatly improved in quality, and win medals and mention at every exposition; but they have India and Ceylon as formidable rivals, in addition to China and Japan, and their market remains in Holland and Germany, and in Persia and Arabia by way of Bombay—this Mohammedan trade an inheritance of those early times, when the Dutch drove the Moormen out of Ceylon and the far Eastern trade.

While the culture system was succeeding with sugar and tea, the government coffee-plantations were extended, and more and more hill-country cleared for such cultivation. Coffee-culture was carried on by the government without contractors’ aid. Each native was obliged to plant six hundred Arabian or Mocha coffee-trees and keep them in bearing, and deliver the crop cleaned and sorted at the government warehouses at a fixed price—nine and twelve florins the picul previous to 1874, although forty and forty-five florins were paid in the open market of the ports. By careful supervision and by percentages paid to native officials for any superior quality in the berries produced in their district, the coffee from Java government stores was superior to anything else sold in Europe, and maintained its average steadily. Coffee was indeed “the pivot of the Netherlands colonial régime,” a staple of greater economic value than spices had been. In 1879, the year of the greatest production of the government plantations in Java, some 79,400 tons of coffee were shipped to Europe. Blight and scale and insect pests were afterward to reduce the shipments to but 17,750 tons in 1887.

Indigo was at first cultivated on the same terms as sugar, but the government soon dispensed with such contracts, bought back the fabriks, and continued the industry without contract aid, obliging the natives to plant indigo on all village land not required for rice, and deliver the crop to the mills at fixed prices. Cinnamon, pepper, cinchona, and cochineal were grown by the natives in the same way, under merely official supervision, and delivered to the government for a trifling price.

In 1850 the government sent agents to Peru to obtain seeds of the cinchona-tree, and after fifteen years of effort and risk the indefatigable botanists and explorers secured the treasured seeds of the red-barked kina-tree. The records of those expeditions, the lives ventured and lost, are the romances of travel and exploration; and Sir Clements Markham’s and Charles Ledger’s narratives are most fascinating tales. The first little nursery of trees in the Buitenzorg Botanical Garden and in experimental gardens on higher ground near Bandong furnished the seeds and plants from which have sprung the great kina-plantations, or cinchona-groves, both government and private, whose red branches show in definite color-masses on every hillside of the Preangers, while the spindling young trees shade acres of tea-, coffee-, and cocoa-plants in their first growths. Java now produces, from government and private plantations together, one half of the world’s supply of quinine, Ceylon and India furnishing the balance. Ship-loads of bark are sent to the laboratories or chemical factories of Europe, which produce the precious sulphate on which rest England’s and Holland’s conquest of the Indies and all European domination in the farther East, and laboratories are now building for manufacturing the sulphate from the bark in Java.

SCENES AROUND THE MARKET.

Poppy-culture has always been strictly prohibited, although the natives are greatly addicted to opium-smoking, especially in the middle or Hindu provinces. With all their zeal for revenue, the Dutch have resisted the example of the British in India and the Chinese in Szechuen and the western provinces of China, and have never let the land bloom with that seductive flower. The sale of opium is a closely guarded government monopoly, conducted at present under the régie system, the government itself importing all that is consumed in the colony and selling it from fixed offices throughout the island.

Salt-works and tin-mines were managed in as systematic and profitable a way as crops and cultures. No private individual was allowed to make or import salt into the colony. The government still holds the salt-supply as a monopoly, and there are large salt-works on Madura Island, where the natives are required to deliver fixed quantities of coarse salt at the government warehouses at the rate (in 1897) of ten gulden the kojan (1853 kilograms). The government manages the tin-mines on Banka Island in the Java Sea, while the mines of the neighboring Billeton Island are leased to private individuals.

IX
THE “CULTURE SYSTEM” (Continued)

The culture system, as an experiment in colonial government and finance, was the greatest success and worked incalculable benefits to the islands and the native people, as well as to the assisted colonists and the crown of Holland. Great stretches of jungle were cleared and brought under cultivation, and more money was paid in wages directly to native cultivators and mill workmen each year than all the natives paid in taxes to the government. The Javanese acquired better homes, much personal wealth, and improved in all the conditions of living. The population increased tenfold during the half-century that the culture system was in operation—this alone an unanswerable reply to all critics and detractors, who declaimed against the oppression and outrage upon the Javanese. As the island became, under this system, a more profitable possession than it had been under the real tyranny exercised during the days of close-trade monopoly, the envy and attention of all the other colonizing nations of Europe were drawn to this new departure in colonial government. Spain copied the system in its tobacco-growing in the Philippine Islands, but could not follow further. Philanthropic and pharisaical neighbors, political economists, advanced political thinkers, humanitarians, and sentimentalists, all addressed themselves to the subject, and usually condemned the culture system in unmeasured terms. Holland’s voluntary abolition of slavery in its East India possessions by no means stilled the storm of invective and abuse. Leaders, speeches, books, pamphlets, even novels,[2] showed up the horrors, the injustice and iniquities said to be perpetrated in Java. It was shown that almost nothing of the great revenues from the island was devoted to the education or benefit of the natives; that no mission or evangelical work was undertaken, or even allowed, by this foremost Protestant people of Europe; and that next to nothing in the way of public works or permanent improvements resulted to the advantage of those who toiled for the alien, absentee landlord, i. e., the crown of Holland,—the country being drained of its wealth for the benefit of a distant monarch. It was estimated that between 1831 and 1877 the natives were mulcted of one billion, seven hundred million francs by the forced labor exacted from them, and the sales of their produce to the government at the low market prices fixed by the purchaser. By continued philippics and exaggerated accusations, the names of Dutch government and Java planter became, to the average European, synonyms for all of rapacity, tyranny, extortion, and cruelty, and there was an impression that something worse than Spanish persecution in the Netherlands, in the name of religion, was being carried on by the Hollanders in Java in the name of the almighty florin. All the iniquities and horrors of the Dutch management of the cinnamon-gardens of Ceylon, and all the infamy of the Dutch East India Company’s misrule in Java during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were stupidly mixed up with and charged against the comparatively admirable, the orderly and excellently devised culture system of Governor Van den Bosch. Contractor planters vainly urged that the only tyranny and oppression of the people came from their own village chiefs; but philanthropists pointed steadily to the colonial government and the system which inspired and upheld the village tyrants.

A VIEW IN BUITENZORG

In 1859 Mr. J. W. B. Money, a Calcutta barrister, visited Java, made exhaustive search and inquiry into every branch and detail of the culture system’s working, and put the results in book form inwoven with a comparison with the less intelligent and successful management of the land and labor question in British India, where, with sixteen times the area and twelve times the population of Java, the revenue is only four times as great. His book, “Java: How to Manage a Colony” (London, Hurst & Blackett, 1861), is a most complete and reliable résumé of the subject, and his opinions throughout were an indorsement of the Van den Bosch culture system. He contrasted warmly the failure and inefficiency of the British India ryot warree, or land system, with the established communal system which the Oriental prefers and is fitted for, and showed how a similar culture system in Bengal and Madras would have worked to the advantage, benefit, and profit of Hindustan, the Hindus, and the British crown. Mr. Money especially noted how the Dutch refrained from interfering with native prejudices and established customs; how the prestige of the native aristocracy was as carefully maintained as that of the white race, with no modern, Western notions of equality, even before the law, the Dutch securing regentship to the leading noble of a district, and giving him more revenue and actual power than were possible under the native emperor. Mr. Money noted only the best of feeling apparently existing between natives and Europeans, a condition dating entirely from the establishment of the culture system, and the general prosperity that succeeded. “No country in the East can show so rich or so contented a peasantry as Java,” he said.

Alfred Russel Wallace, who visited Java several times between 1854 and 1862, while the culture system was at the height of its successful working, spoke in approval and praise of what he saw of the actual system and its results, and commended it as the only means of forcing an indolent, tropical race to labor and develop the resources and industries of the island. His was one of the few clear, dispassionate, and intelligent statements given on that side, and he summed up his observations in the declaration that Java was “the very garden of the East, and perhaps, upon the whole, the richest, best-cultivated, and the best-governed island in the world.”

The competition of French beet-sugar, fed by large government bounties of West Indian and Hawaiian sugars, so reduced the price of sugar in Europe that in 1871 the Dutch government began to withdraw from the sugar-trade, and by 1890 had no interest in nor connection with any of the many mills which colonists had built on the island. Java ranked second only to Cuba in the production of cane-sugar, and now (1897) ranks first in the world. Trade returns now show sugar exports to the value of six million pounds sterling from the private plantations of Java and Sumatra each year, and the distillation of arrack for the trade with Norway and Sweden is an important business.

At the time that sugar began to fall in price, owing to Western competition, Brazilian and Central American coffees began to command a place in the European market and to reduce prices; and then the blight, which reached Sumatra in 1876, attacked Java plantations in 1879, and spread slowly over the island, ruining one by one all the plantations of the choice Arabian or Mocha coffee-trees. As the area of thriving plantations decreased, and acres and acres of the white skeletons of blighted trees belted the hillsides, vain attempts were made at replanting. Only the tough, woody, coarse African or Liberian coffee-tree, with its large leaves and large, flat berries,—a plant which thrives equally in a damp or a dry climate, and luxuriates in the poorest, stoniest ground,—seems to be proof against the blight that devastated the Ceylon and Java coffee-plantations so thoroughly at the same time. Many of the old coffee-plantations in Java, as in Ceylon, were burned over and planted to tea; yet in many places in the Preangers one sees the bleached skeletons of Arabian trees still standing, and the abandoned plantations smothered in weeds and creepers, and fast relapsing to jungle. The virgin soil of Sumatra has so far escaped the severest attacks of the blight, and the center of coffee-production there is near Padang, on the west coast, whence the bulk of the crop goes directly to England or America in British ships.

The blight forced the Dutch government to begin its retirement from the coffee-trade, and but the smallest fraction of the coffee exported now goes from government plantations or warehouses. Nearly all the Sumatra plantations are owned or leased by private individuals, and the greater part of coffee lands in Java are cultivated by independent planters, who sell their crop freely in the open market. With the wholesale replanting of the Liberian tree in place of the Arabian, and the shipping only of the large, flat Liberian bean instead of the Mocha’s small, round berry, it is questionable whether the little real “government Java” that goes to market is entitled to the name which won the esteem of coffee-drinking people for the century before the blight. The Dutch government still raises and sells coffee, but under strong protest and opposition in Holland, and as a temporary concession during these times of financial straits.

Public opinion was gradually aroused in Holland, and opponents of the culture system at last spoke out in the States-General; but not until the prices of sugar and coffee had fallen seriously, and the blight had ruined nearly all the government coffee-plantations, did the stirring of Holland’s conscience bid the government retire from trade and agriculture, and leave the development of the island’s resources, in natural and legitimate ways, to the enterprise of the many European settlers then established in permanence in Java, who had begun to see that the government was their most serious rival and competitor in the market.

The common sense and cooler vision of these days since its abandonment have shown that the culture system was an inspiration, a stroke of administrative genius of the first order, accomplishing in a few decades, for the material welfare of the island and its people, what the native race of a tropical country never could or would have done in centuries. The American mind naturally puzzles most over the idea that twenty odd millions of people of one race, language, and religion should ever have submitted to be ruled by a mere handful of over-sea usurpers and speculators. Considering the genius and characteristics of all Asiatic people, their superstitions, fatalism, self-abasement, and continuous submission to alien conquests and despotisms, which all their histories record and their religions almost seem to enjoin, and remembering the successive Buddhist, Brahmanic, and Mohammedan conquests and conversions of Java, and the domestic wars of three centuries since Islam’s invasion, the half-century of the culture system’s prosperous trial seems a most fortunate epoch and the cause of the admirable and surprising conditions existing to-day in that model garden and hothouse of the world.

It was much regretted later that some part of the culture system’s enormous profits was not devoted to railway construction and the making of the new harbor for Batavia at Tandjon Priok, as, immediately after the system’s abandonment, railways and the new harbor became more urgent needs, and had to be provided for out of the current revenues, then taxed with the vigorous beginning of the Achinese struggle—Holland’s thirty years’ war in the Indies, which has so sadly crippled the exchequer. In order to provide a crown revenue in lieu of the sugar and coffee sales, a poll-tax was imposed on the natives in place of the seventh of their labor given to culture-system crops, and increased taxes were levied on lands and property; but through the extensive public works, the long-continued Achinese war in Sumatra, and the little war with the Sassaks in Lombok (1894), the deficits in the colonial budgets have become more ominous every year since 1876. The crown of Holland no longer receives a golden stream from the Indies, and is pushed to devise means to meet its obligations.

The culture system brought to Java a selected lot of refined, intelligent, capable, energetic colonists, who, settling there in permanence and increasing their holdings and wealth, have become the most numerous and important body of Europeans on the island. The great sugar and coffee barons, the patriarchal rulers of vast tea-gardens, the kina and tobacco kings, really rule Netherlands India. The planters and the native princes have much in common, and in the Preangers these horse-racing country gentlemen affiliate greatly and make common social cause against the small aristocracy of office-holders, who have been wont to regard the native nobles and the mercantile communities of the ports from on high.

The colonial government has never welcomed aliens to the isles, whether those bent on business or on pleasure. Dutch suspicion still throws as many difficulties as possible in the way of a tourist, and it took strong preventive measures against an influx of British or other uitlander planters when the abandonment of the culture system made private plantations desirable, and the opening of the Suez Canal brought Java so near to Europe. As a better climate, better physical conditions of every kind, and a more docile, industrious native race were to be found in Java than elsewhere in the Indies, there was a threatened invasion of coffee- and tea-planters, more particularly from India and Ceylon. The Boer of the tropics, like his kinsman in South Africa, found effectual means to so hamper as virtually to exclude the uitlander planters. Land-transfers and leases were weighted with inconceivable restrictions and impositions; heavy taxes, irksome police and passport regulations, and nearly as many restraints as were put upon Arabs and Chinese, urged the British planter to go elsewhere, since he could not have any voice in local or colonial government in a lifetime.[3] Six years’ residence is required for naturalization, but the Briton is rarely willing to change his allegiance—it is his purpose rather to Anglicize, naturalize, annex, or protect all outlying countries as English.

The governor-general of the colony may revoke the toelatings-kaart of any one, Dutch as well as alien, and order him out of Netherlands India; and a resident is such an autocrat that he can order any planter or trader out of his domain if it is shown that he habitually maltreats or oppresses the natives, or does anything calculated to compromise the superior standing or prestige of the white people. The Dutch are severe upon this latter point, and the best of them uphold a certain noblesse oblige as imperative upon all who possess a white skin. The European military officer is sent to Holland for court martial and punishment, that the native soldiers may remain ignorant of his degradation, and the European who descends to drunkenness is hurried from native sight and warned. While the conquerors hold these people with an iron grasp, they aim to treat them with absolute justice. Many officials and planters have married native wives, and their children, educated in Europe, with all the advantages of wealth and cultured surroundings, do not encounter any race or color prejudice nor any social barriers in their life in Java. They are Europeans in the eye of the law and the community, and enjoy “European freedom.” No native man is allowed to marry or to employ a European, not even as a tutor or governess, and no such subversion of social order as the employment of a European servant is to be thought of. There is a romance, all too true, of governmental interference, and the dismissal from his office of regent, of the native prince who wished to marry a European girl whose parents fully consented to the alliance. The laws allow a European to put away his native wife, to legally divorce her, upon the slightest pretexts, and to abandon her and her children with little redress; but fear of Malay revenge, the chilling tales of slow, mysterious deaths overtaking those who desert Malay wives or return to Europe without these jealous women, act as restraining forces.

The Dutch do not pose as philanthropists, nor pretend to be in Java “for the good of the natives.” They have found the truth of the old adage after centuries of obstinate experiment in the other line, and honesty in all dealings with the native is much the best policy and conduces most to the general prosperity and abundant crops. Fear of the Malay spirit of revenge, and the terrible series of conspiracies and revolts of earlier times, have done much, perhaps, to bring about this era of kindness, fair dealing, and justice. The native is now assured his rights almost more certainly than in some freer countries, and every effort is made to prevent the exercise of tyrannical authority by village chiefs, the main oppressors. He can always appeal to justice and be heard; the prestige of the native aristocracy is carefully maintained; the Oriental ideas of personal dignity and the laws of caste are strictly regarded, and, if from prudential and economic reasons only, no omissions in such lines are allowed to disturb the even flow of the florin Hollandward.

Already the spirit of the age is beginning to reach Java, and it is something to make all the dead Hollanders turn in their graves when it can be openly suggested that there should be a separate and independent budget for Netherlands India, and that there should be some form of popular representation—a deliberative assembly of elected officials to replace the close Council of India. In fact, suggestions for the actual autonomy of Java have been uttered aloud. There are ominous signs everywhere, and the government finds its petty remnant of coffee-culture and grocery business a more vexing and difficult venture each year. The Samarang “Handelsblad,” in commenting on it, says:

“The Javanese are no longer as easily led and driven as a flock of sheep, however much we may deplore that their character has changed in this respect. The Javanese come now a great deal into contact with Europeans, the education spread among them has had an effect, and communication has been rendered easy. They do not fear the European as they did formerly. The time is gone when the entire population of a village could be driven to a far-off plantation with a stick; the pruning-knife and the ax would quickly be turned against the driver in our times. The Javanese to-day does not believe that you are interested in his welfare only; he is well aware that he is cheated out of a large proportion of the value of the coffee that is harvested. Some people may think it a pity that the time of coercion is coming to an end in Java, but that cannot change the facts. The dark period in the history of Java is passing away, and every effort to prevent reforms will call forth the enmity of the natives.”

The state committee on government coffee-plantations says in its latest reports:

“It cannot be denied that the intellectual status of the Javanese at the present day is very different from that during the time when the coffee monopoly was introduced. The reforms which we have introduced in the administration of justice, the education according to Western methods, and the free admission of private enterprise have all brought about a change. If the native has not become more progressive and more sensible, he is at least wiser in matters about which he had best be kept in the dark, unless the government means to remove coercion at the expense of the exchequer.”

JAVANESE COOLIES GAMBLING.

The Amsterdam “Handelsblad” remarks that, “as far as the Dutch possessions are concerned, coercion and monopoly indeed must go. People who cannot see this betimes will find out their mistake rather suddenly.”

That sage socialist, Élisée Reclus, remarks that “once more it appears that monopoly ends in the ruin not only of the despoilers, but of the state.”

X
SINAGAR

Scientists and lay tourists have equally exhausted their adjectives in laudations of Java, Miss Marianne North calling it “one magnificent garden of luxuriance, surpassing Brazil, Jamaica, and Sarawak combined”; and Alfred Russel Wallace epitomizing it after this fashion: “Taking it as a whole, and surveying it from every point of view, Java is probably the very finest and most interesting tropical island in the world.... The most fertile, productive, and populous island in the tropics.” Lesser folk have been as sweeping in their superlatives, and all agree that, of all exiled cultivators in the far parts of the world, the Java planter is most to be envied, leading, as he does, the ideal tropical life, the one best worth living, in a land where over great areas it is always luxurious, dreamy afternoon, and in the beautiful hill-country is always the fresh, breezy, dewy summer forenoon of the rarest June.

The most favored and the most famous plantations are those around Buitenzorg and in the Preanger regencies, which lie on the other side of Gedeh and Salak, those two sleeping volcanoes that look down upon their own immediate foot-hills and valleys, to see those great, rolling tracts all cultivated like a Haarlem tulip-bed. Above the cacao limit, tea-gardens, coffee-estates, and kina-plantations cover all the land lying between the altitudes of two thousand and four thousand feet above the level of the sea. The owners of these choicest bits of “the Garden of the East” lead an existence that all other planters of growing crops, and most people who value the creature comforts, the luxuries of life, and nature’s opulence, may envy. The climate of the hills is all that Sybarite could wish for,—a perpetual 70° by day, with light covering required at night,—the warm sun of the tropics tempering the fresh mountain air to an eternal mildness, in which the human animal thrives and luxuriates quite as do all the theobromas and caffein plants in the ground. In the near circle of these two great peaks there is no really dry season, despite the southeast monsoon of the conventional summer months. Every day in the year enjoys its shower, swept from one mountain or the other; and the heavy thunderstorms at the change of the monsoons and during the winter rainy season are the joy of the planter’s heart, shaking out myriads of young tea-leaves by their jar and rushing winds, and freshening the coffee-trees like a tonic. As every day has its shower, each day has its tea-crop gathered and cured in this favorable region; and that profitable industry is as continuous and unchanging as the seasons on the Preanger hillsides, and paramount there, now that coffee is no longer king.

The two great plantations of Sinagar and Parakan Salak, principalities of twelve and fifteen thousand acres respectively, that lie in the valley between Salak and Gedeh, are the oldest and the model tea-gardens of Java, the show-places of the Preangers. Parong Koeda and Tjibitad, an hour beyond Buitenzorg, are practically private railway-stations for these two great estates. The post-road from Tjibitad to Sinagar follows the crest of a ridge, and gives magnificent views between its shade-trees over twenty miles of rolling country, cultivated to the last acre. Blue vapors were tumbling in masses about the summit of Salak the afternoon we coursed along the avenues of shade-trees, and the low growls of distant thunder gave promise of the regular afternoon benefit shower to the thirsty plants and trees that ridged every slope and level with lines of luxuriant green. The small ponies scampered down an avenue of magnificent kanari-trees, with a village of basket houses like to those of Lilliput at the base of the lofty trunks, and, with a rush and a sudden turn around tall shrubbery, brought up before the low white bungalow, where the master of Sinagar sat in his envied ease under such vines and trees as would form a mise en scène for an ideal, generally acceptable paradise. A sky-line of tall areca-palms, massed flame-trees, and tamarinds, with vivid-leafed bougainvillea vines pouring down from one tree-top and mantling two or three lesser trees, filled the immediate view from the great portico-hall, or living-room, where the welcoming cups of afternoon tea were at once served.

With the nearest neighbor ten miles away, and the thousand workmen employed upon the place settled with their families in different villages within its confines, Sinagar is a little world or industrial commune by itself, its master a patriarchal ruler, whose sway over these gentle, childlike Javanese is as absolute as it is kindly and just. The “master” has sat under his Sinagar palms and gorgeous bougainvilleas for twenty-six out of the thirty-three years spent in Java, and his sons and daughters have grown up there, gone to Holland to finish their studies, and, returning, have made Sinagar a social center of this part of the Preangers. The life is like that of an English country house, with continental and tropical additions that unite in a social order replete with pleasure and interest. Weekly musicales are preceded by large dinner-parties, guests driving from twenty miles away and coming by train; and, with visitors in turn from all parts of the world, the guest-book is a polyglot and cosmopolitan record of great interest. Long wings have been added to the original bungalow dwelling, inclosing a spacious court, or garden, all connected by arcades and all illuminated by electric lights. The ladies’ boudoir at the far end of the buildings opens from a great portico, or piazza, furnished with the hammocks, the ratan furniture, and the countless pillows of a European or American summer villa, but looking out on a marvelous flower-garden and an exquisite landscape view. To that portico were brought the rarest flowers and fruits for our inspection,—such lilies and orchids and strangely fragrant things!—and we cut apart cacao-pods, and those “velvety, cream-colored peaches” inclosing the nutmeg, and dissected clove-buds with a zeal that amused the young hostesses, to whom these had all been childhood toys. The telephone and telegraph connect all parts of the estate with virtually all parts of the world; and with the great news of Europe clicking in from Batavia, or “helloed” over by some friend at Buitenzorg, one could quite forget the distance from the older centers of civilization, and wonder that all the world did not make Java its playground and refuge of delight, and every man essay the rôle of Java planter.

While we sat at tea that first afternoon, two brilliant scarlet minivers flashed across the screen of shrubbery like tongues of flame, followed by crimson-and-black orioles; while at the master’s call a flock of azure-and-iris-winged pigeons came whirling through the air and settled before us in all the sheen and beauty of their plumage. A great wire house full of rare tropic birds was the center of attraction for all the wild birds of the neighborhood, and gorgeously feathered and strangely voiced visitors were always on wing among the shrubbery. In that big aviary lived and flew and walked in beauty the crested Java pigeon, a creature flashing with all intense prismatic blues, and wearing on its head an aigret of living sapphires trembling on long, pliant stems—one of the most graceful and beautiful birds in the world. Other birds of brilliant plumage, wonderful cockatoos, parrots, long-tailed pheasants, and beauties of unknown name, lived as a happy family in the one great cage, around which prowled and sat licking its whiskers a cat of most enterprising and sagacious mien—a cat that had come all the way from Chicago, only to have its lakeside appetite tormented by this Barmecide feast of rainbow birds.

We were led past flower-beds nodding with strange lilies, past rose-gardens and oleander-hedges, down a paved path that was a steep tunnel through dense shrubbery and overarching trees, to a great white marble tank, or swimming-pool, as large as a ball-room; though few ball-rooms can ever have such lavish decorations of palms, bamboos, and tree-ferns as screen that pool around, with the purple summit of Salak showing just above the highest plumes and fronds—a landscape study just fitted for a theatrical drop-curtain. We might swim or splash, dive or float, or sit on marble steps and comfortably soak at will in that great white tank, the clear spring water warmed by the sun to a soothing temperature for the long, luxurious afternoon bath, and cooled sufficiently through the night to give refreshing shock to early morning plungers. Only the approaching storm, the nearer rumbles of thunder, and finally the first small raindrops induced us to leave that fairy white pool, deep sunk in its tropic glen.

After a half-hour of soft rain, accompanied by three sharp thunder-claps, the climate had done its perfect work; every tree, bird, flower, and insect rejoiced, and all nature literally sang. The warm red earth breathed pleasant fragrance, every tree had its aroma, and the perfumed flowers were overpowering with fresh sweetness. Then the master led the house party for a long walk, first through the oldest tea-gardens, where every leaf on every plant was erect, shining, as if ready for dress-parade, and more intensely, softly green than ever after the daily shower-bath and wind toilet. We strolled on through a toy village under a kanari avenue, where all the avocations and industries of Javanese life were on view, and the little people, smiling their welcome, dropped on their heels in the permanent courtesy of the dodok, the squatting attitude of humility common to all Asiatics. The servants who had brought notes to the master, as he sat on the porch, crouched on their heels as they offered them, and remained in that position until dismissed; and the villagers and wayfarers, hastily dropping on their haunches, maintained that lowly, reverent attitude until we had passed—an attitude and a degree of deference not at all comfortable for an American to contemplate, ineradicable old Javanese custom as it may be. The tiny brown babies, exactly matching the brown earth in tone, crawled over the warm lap of nature, crowing and gurgling their pleasure, their plump little bodies free from all garments, and equally free from any danger of croups or colds from exposure to the weather. We took a turn through the great cement-floored fabrik, with its ingenious machines all silent for that night, and only the electric-light dynamos whirling to illuminate the great settlement of outbuildings around the residence. The stables were another great establishment by themselves, and fifty odd Arabian and Australian thoroughbreds, housed in a long, open-fronted stable, were receiving their evening rub and fare from a legion of grooms. Morphine, Malaria, Quinine, Moses, and Aaron, and other cup-winners, arched their shining necks, pawed to us, and nibbled their reward of tasseled rice-heads, brought on carrying-poles from the granaries, where legions of rice-sparrows twittered in perpetual residence. We sat on a bank near the little race-course, or manège, where the colts are trained, and the favorites were led past and put through their paces and accomplishments one by one. It was almost dusk, with the swiftness with which day closes in the tropics, when the banteng, or wild cow (Bos sondaicus), was trotted out—a clumsy, dun-colored creature, with a strange, musky odor, that was brought as a calf from the wild south-coast country, and was at once mothered and protected by a fussy little sheep, “the European goat,” as the natives call the woolly animal from abroad, that was still guiding and driving it with all the intelligence of a collie.

The bachelor planter partner showed us his bungalow, full of hunting-trophies—skulls and skins of panthers, tigers, and wild dogs; tables made of rhinoceros-hide resting on rhinoceros and elephant skulls, and tables made of mammoth turtle-shells resting on deer-antlers. The great prizes were the nine huge banteng skulls, trophies of hunting-trips to the South Preanger, the lone region bordering on the Indian Ocean. There were also chandeliers of deer-antlers, and a frieze-like wall-bordering of python-skins, strange tusks and teeth, wings and feathers galore, and dozens of kodak pictures as witnesses and records of the many camps and battues of this sportsman—all gathered in that same wild region of big game, as much as fifty or a hundred miles away, but referred to in the Buitenzorg neighborhood as New York sportsmen used to speak of the buffalo country—“the south coast” and “out West,” equally synonyms for all untamed, far-away wildness. Elephant-hunting must be enjoyed in Sumatra, since that animal has never existed in a wild state in Java.

With the younger people of the master’s family, his young managers and assistants, fresh from Amsterdam schools and European universities, speaking English and several other languages, au courant with all the latest in the world’s music, art, literature, and drama, plantation life and table-talk were full of interest and varied amusements. By a whir of the telephone, two of the assistants were bidden ride over from their far corner of the estate for dinner, and afterward a quartet of voices and instruments made the marble-floored music-room ring, while the elder men smoked meditatively, or clicked the billiard-balls in their deliberate, long-running tourney. The latest books and the familiar American magazines strewed boudoir and portico tables, and naturally there was talk of them.

“Ah, we like so much your American magazines—the ‘Century’ and the others. We admire so much the pictures. And then all those stories of the early Dutch colonists at Manhattan! We like, too, your great American novelists—Savage, Howells, Gunter—‘The Rise of Silas Lapham,’ ‘Mr. Potter of Texas,’ and all those. We read them so much.”

They were undoubtedly disappointed that we did not speak Dutch, or at least read it, since all Hollanders know that Dutch is the language of the best families in New York, of the cultivated classes and all polite society in the United States, since from the mynheers of Manhattan came the first examples of refined living in the New World. “The English colonists were of all sorts, you know, like in Australia,” said our informants at Buitenzorg and everywhere else on the island, “and that is why you Americans are all so proud of your Dutch descent.”

XI
PLANTATION LIFE

After the sunrise cup of coffee at Sinagar—such coffee as we had dreamed of and confidently expected to enjoy, but never did encounter anywhere else in Java—all the men of the household appeared in riding-gear, and were off to inspect and direct work in the many gardens and sections of the estate. The ladies took us for a walk across the tea-fields to the great landmark of a Sinagar palm, which gave the name to the estate, and from which lookout we could view the miles of luxuriant fields between it and Parakan Salak’s group of white houses, and also, chief feature in every view, the splendid blue slopes and summit of Salak clear cut against a sky of the palest, most heavenly turquoise. It was a very dream of a tropic morning, and a Java tea-garden seemed more than ever an earthly paradise.

Tea-bushes covered thousands of acres around and below us, as the ground dropped away from that commanding ridge, their formal rows decreasing in perspective until they shaded the landscape like a fine line-engraving. For mile after mile one could walk in direct line between soldierly files of tea-bushes—Chinese, Assam, and hybrids. The Chinese plant, descended by generations from that same wild bush discovered in Assam near the Yunnan frontier by English botanists in 1834, has, by centuries of cultivation, been brought to grow in low, compact little mats, or mere rosettes of bushes. It has a thick, woody stem, gnarled and twisted like any dwarf tree, and some of the Chinese tea-bushes at Sinagar are fifty or sixty years of age, the pioneers and patriarchs of their kind in Java, original seedlings and first importations from China. The Assam or wild Himalayan tea-plant is a tall spindling bush with large, thin leaves, and grafted on Chinese stock produces the tall hybrid commonly grown in the tea-gardens of Java. The red soil of these gardens is always being raked loose around the tea-plants, and at every dozen or twenty feet a deep hole, or trench, is dug to admit air and water more freely to the roots. Constant care is given lest these little open graves, or air-holes, fill up after heavy rains, and not a weed nor a stray blade of grass is allowed to invade these prim, orderly gardens and rob the soil of any of its virtues. Each particular bush is tended and guarded as if it were the rarest ornamental exotic, and the tea-gardens, with their broad stripings of green upon the red ground, and skeleton lines of palms outlining the footpaths and the divisional limits of each garden, are like a formal exhibit of tea-growing, an exposition model on gigantic scale, a fancy farmer’s experimental show-place.

In the unending summer of the hill-country there is no “tea season,” no “spring leaf,” “first pickings,” or “fire-fly crop,” as in China and Japan. Two years after the young seedling has been transplanted to the formal garden rows its leaves may be gathered; and there are new leaves every day, so that picking, curing, firing, and packing continue the year round. The tea-pickers, mostly women, gather the leaves only when the plants are free from dew or rain. They pick with the lightest touch of thumb and finger, heaping the leaves on a square cloth spread on the ground, and then tying up the bundle and “toting” it off on their heads, for all the world like the colored aunties of our southern states. The bright colors of their jackets and sarongs, and of their bundles, that look like exaggerated bandana turbans, give gay and picturesque relief to the green-striped gardens, whose exact lines converge in long, monotonous perspective whichever way one looks. There is great fascination in watching these bobbing figures among the bushes gradually converge to single lines, and the procession of lank, slender sarongs file through the gardens, down the avenues of palm and tamarind, to the fabrik.

JAVANESE DANCING-GIRL.

The long, red-tiled buildings of the fabrik, in their order and speckless neatness, with the array of ingenious and intelligent machines, seem yet more like part of an exposition exhibit—a small machinery hall of some great international industrial aggregation. The picking and the processes of converting the tea-leaves into the green, oolong, and black teas of commerce, and of packing them into large and small, air-tight, leaded packages for export, occupy, at the most, but two days in ordinary working seasons. Less green tea is sold each year, and soon the entire Java crop of tea will be cured to the half black, or oolong, and the standard black tea, which alone can find sale in England or in Russia, the largest and most critical tea-consuming countries of Europe. An especially fine black tea is made at these Preanger tea-fabriks, and for this the green leaves are first exposed to the sun in wicker trays for wilting, then rolled by machinery to free the juices in the leaf-cells, and fermented in heaps for four or eight hours, until by their turning a dark reddish brown there is evidence that the rank theine, the active principle or stimulating alkaloid in the leaves, has been oxidized, and so modified into something less injurious to human nerves and the digestive system. The bruised red leaves are dried in a machine where hot blasts and revolving fans make quick, clean work of the “firing,” that perspiring coolies do by hand over charcoal pans in China and Japan. All the sifting, sorting, packing, and labeling, the pressing of the broken leaves and dust into bricks, go on as neatly, swiftly, and surely; and the cases are hauled away to the railway-station and shipped from Batavia to their special markets. The leaves to be made into green teas are given a first toasting, almost as they come in from the bushes, are rolled on great trays ranged on tables in an open court, and fired again, and more thoroughly, before packing. As the taste of the world’s tea-drinkers becomes more cultivated, green tea will lose favor, and the Java tea-fabriks will be employed in directly competing with the factories of India and Ceylon, from whose culture experiments they have profited, and whose ingenious machines they have so generally adopted for curing and preparing black teas. Often the profuse “flushing” of the tea-bushes forces the fabrik to run all night to dispose of the quantity of fresh leaves; and one gets an idea of the world’s increasing consumption of tea in this quarter of a century since Java, India, and Ceylon entered into competition in the tea-trade with China and Japan. Parakan Salak teas are advertised and sold in Shanghai and Yokohama, and the appeal to those great tea-marts is significant of a progressive spirit in Java trade, that is matched by the threat that petroleum from Java’s oil-wells will soon compete seriously with American and Russian oil.

The coffee harvest is a fixed event in the plantation’s calendar, and occurs regularly in April and May, at the close of the rainy season. Now that the finer Arabian shrub has been so largely replaced by the hardy Liberian tree, coffee-culture is a little less arduous than before. The berries are brought to the mill, husked by machinery, washed, dried on concrete platforms in the sun, sacked, and shipped to Batavia, and nothing more is heard of that crop until the next spring comes around. The trees are carefully tended and watched, of course, throughout the year, and scrutinized closely for any sign of scale or worm, bug or blight. The glowing red volcanic soil is always being weeded and raked and loosened, the trees trimmed, young plants from the great nursery of seedlings set out in place of the old trees, and the coffee area extended annually by clearings.

The Sundanese who live in their ornamental little fancy baskets of houses beneath Sinagar’s tall tamarinds and kanari-trees are much to be envied by their people. The great estate is a world of its own, an agricultural Arcadia, where life goes on so happily that it is most appropriate that they should have presented model Javanese village life at the Chicago Exposition in 1893. These little Sinagar villagers have their frequent passers on one side or the other of the demesne by turn, with theater and wayang-wayang, or puppet-shows, lasting far into the night. Professional raconteurs thrill them with classic tales of their glorious past, while musicians make sweet, sad melodies to rise from gamelan, or gambang kayu, from fiddle, drum, bowls, bells, and the sonorous alang-alang—a rude instrument of most ancient origin, made of five or eight graduated bamboo tubes, cut like organ-pipes, and hung loosely in a frame, which, shaken by a master hand, or swinging in the breeze from some tree-branch, produces the strangest, most weird and fascinating melodies in all the East.

The play of village life about Sinagar is so prettily picturesque, so well presented and carried out, that it seems only a theatrical representation—a Petit Trianon sort of affair at the least. The smiling little women, who rub and toss tea-leaves over the wilting-trays at the fabrik, seem only to be playing with the loose leaves like a larger sort of intelligent, careful children. In the same way the plucking in the tea-gardens and the march to the fabrik in long, single file, with bundles balanced on their heads, are mere kindergarten exercises to develop the muscles of the back and secure an erect and graceful carriage—the secret, perhaps, of their splendid bearing, although all Javanese walk as kings and queens are supposed to walk, as the result of not being hampered by useless garments, and thus having control of every member and muscle of the body from earliest years. The same supple ease and grace distinguish their manners too, and one young planter said: “After living a few years among these gentle, graceful, winning natives, you cannot know how Europe jarred upon me. All the hard, sad, scowling faces and the harsh, angry voices oppressed me and made me so homesick for Java that I was really glad to turn away from it. I never before was so aware of the poverty, misery, distress, and vice of Europe.”

Visitors to the Paris Exposition of 1889 and the Chicago Exposition of 1893 had a typical model Javanese village set before them, and all were unstinted in their praises of the mise en scène and the human features of the exhibit. The Chicago village was peopled by families from the Sinagar and Parakan Salak estates, and, as a purely ethnological exhibit, was the one success of that kind among the many trifling side-shows that detracted from the character of the Midway Plaisance. The trip to America was the prize and reward allotted to the most industrious and deserving villagers, who with their properties and industrial accessories filled two sailing-ships from Batavia to Hong Kong, whence they took steamer to San Francisco and railway across the continent to Chicago. There was a large outlay required at the start, and the best workmen were away from the estates for a year; and between a dishonest shipping-agent at Batavia and the heavy commissions upon all receipts levied by the exposition’s managers at Chicago, and the free admissions which those same generous American managers bestowed so widely, the village did not nearly pay its current expenses, and the venture stands as an entire loss, or a gift to the American people from the two public-spirited Preanger planters who paid for it.

The good little Javanese who went to Chicago returned from their great outing as simple and unspoiled as before, settled down contentedly under their kanari-trees, and resumed their routine life in field and fabrik. And what tales they had to tell to open-mouthed villagers and neighbors, who sat around the traveled ones, to the neglect of wayang-wayang and provincial professional story-tellers, listening to their accounts of the very remarkable things on that other side of the world! For the first time ever in their lives these Javanese saw white men at work in the fields, drudging in city streets, and doing every kind of menial, coolie labor. They saw a few black men, blacker than Moormen, but they were great personages, wearing fine uniforms and having command of the railway-trains, and riding in the most magnificently gilded cars—individuals treated always with great respect, who came to the Midway Plaisance in rich clothing, with gold watch-chains, jeweled scarf-pins, and much loose money in their pockets—a superior and a moneyed, if not the ruling class, in that topsy-turvy country, America.

A striped cat of the common roof-and-fence variety was given to one of the village managers, and made the journey back to Java with the party. Everything else in Chicago had been paid for so dearly that this tabby could be fairly said to represent the entire profit and result of the Chicago village venture. The cat was named “Chicago,” and soon became the pet of the whole plantation, roaming freely everywhere, and feasting on small rice-mice and tropical birds. “Chicago” came to us on our arrival, rubbed in friendly fashion against one and another American knee, and purred loudly, as if recognizing us for compatriots. The morning we left Sinagar there was hubbub and running to and fro in the great quadrangle of the residence. “Chicago,” while walking the well-curb with gesticulating tail, had lost her balance, and with frightful cries and a splash ended her existence—by unpleasant coincidence, just as we were making our farewells to our kindly host. “In despair at being unable to return to America with you,” said one mourner, “she has thrown herself in the well. It is plainly suicide.” And this domestic tragedy saddened our leave-taking from those charming people, the fine flavor of whose hospitality, courtesy and kindliness took the edge from many of our disagreeable experiences in Java, and gave us pleasant memories with which to offset those of the other kind.

XII
ACROSS THE PREANGER REGENCIES

One may ride all day by train from Buitenzorg before reaching the limits of the Preanger regencies, where native princes still hold pretended sway; and it is a continuous landscape feast from the sunrise start to the sunset halt of the through-train. The railway line, after curving around the shoulder of Salak, runs through the vaunted hill-country, the region of the great tea, coffee, and kina estates; and from Soekaboemi to Bandong, the two great headquarters for planters, one perceives that the planter is paramount, the cultivator is king. The new cultures have not dispossessed the old, however, and the sawas, or flooded rice-fields, break the level of plain and valley floor with their myriad waving lines of division, and climb by terraces to the very hilltops—a system of cultivation and irrigation as old as the human race, and followed in these same valleys by these same Sundanese since the beginning of their recorded time. To them rice is a holy grain, the offspring of a god, and the gods’ best gift to man; a grain both cultivated and worshiped. It argues for the industry of a tropical race that they should grow this troublesome grain at all, the grain that demands more back-breaking toil and constant attention from planting to harvest-time than any other grain which grows. It would seem discouraging to rice-cultivation, too, when in old times the natives were taxed according to the area of their rice-lands only, and mulcted of a fifth of their rice when it was harvested—all in this happy land, where they might sit under the breadfruit- and banana-trees and doze at their ease, while those kindly fruits dropped in their laps. These picturesque rice-fields have won for Java the name of “the granary of the East,” and enabled it to export that grain in quantities, besides supporting its own great population, one of the densest in the world, and averaging four hundred and fifty inhabitants to each square mile. No fertilizer of any kind is applied to these irrigated rice-fields, save to burn over and plow under the rich stubble, after the padi, or ripe ears of grain, have been cut singly with a knife and borne away in miniature sheaves strung on carrying-poles across the peasants’ shoulders.

Beyond the region of the great plantations, where every hillside is cleared and planted up to the kina limit, and only the summits and steepest slopes are left to primeval jungle, there succeed great stretches of wild country, where remarkable engineering feats were required of the railway-builders. With two heavy engines the train climbs to Tjandjoer station, sixteen hundred feet above the sea; and there, if one has telegraphed the order ahead, he may lunch at ease in his compartment as the train goes on. He may draw from the three-storied lunch-basket handed in either a substantial riz tavel, consisting of a little of everything heaped upon a day’s ration of boiled rice, or a “tiffin,” whose pièce de résistance is a huge bifstek mit ard appelen, that would satisfy the cravings of any three dragoons. Either feast is followed by bread or bananas, with a generous section of a cheese, with mangosteens or other fruits, and one feels that he has surely reached the land of plenty and solid, solid comforts, where fate cannot harm him—when all this may be handed in to fleeting tourists at a florin and a half apiece.

After this station of abundant rations, all signs of cultivation and occupancy disappear, and the station buildings and the endless lantana-hedges along the railway-track are the only signs of human habitation or energy in the wilderness of hills covered with alang-alang or bamboo-grass, and the coarse glagah reeds which cattle will not touch. The banteng, the one-horned rhinoceros, and the tigers that used to roam these moors, fled when the shriek of the locomotive was heard in the cañons, and the sportsmen have to seek such big game in the jungles and grass-lands of the south coast. The streams that come cascading down from all these green heights have carved out some beautiful scenery, and the Tjitaroem River, foaming in sight for a while, disappears, runs through a mountain by a natural tunnel, and reappears in a deep gorge, of which one has an all-too-exciting view as the train crosses on a spidery viaduct high in air.

A great, fertile green plain surrounds the native capital of Bandong, and on its confines rises the Tangkoeban-Praoe, the Ararat of the natives, who see in its square summit-lines the reversed praoe in which their ancestors survived the flood, and, turning their boat over carefully to dry, descended, as the waters fell, to people the Malay universe. One may ascend the butte-like peak, passing up first through a belt of old coffee-plantations, whose product ranked first in the good old days before the blight, and by the villa and experimental grounds of Herr Junghuhn, the botanist, who first succeeded with the kina-culture and introduced so many other economic plants and trees to the island. At Lembang, ten miles from Bandong, the mountain-climber gives up his pony or carriage, and is carried in a djoelie, or sedan-chair, through a magnificent jungle to the edge of the open crater, where bubbling sulphur-pools in an ashy floor, and a wide view over the fertile valley, are sufficient reward for all exertion on the climber’s part.

Bandong itself, as the capital of the Preanger regencies and the home of the native regent and the Dutch resident, is a place of great importance to both races. The regent, as a mere puppet and pensioner of the colonial government, supports the shadow of his old state and splendor in a large dalem, or palace, in the heart of the town. He has also a suburban villa in European style, to which are attached large racing-stables, and this progressive regent is a regular cup-winner at the Buitenzorg and Bandong races at every summer, or dry-season, meet, when the “good monsoon” inspires all the islanders to their greatest social exertions.

As one gets farther into the center of the island, native life becomes more picturesque, and every station platform offers one more diverting study. There is more color in costume, and the wayside and platform groups are kaleidoscopic with their gay sarongs and kerchiefs. More men are seen wearing the military jacket of rank with the native sarong, and the boat-handled kris thrust in the belt at the back. The little children, who ride astride of their mothers’ hips and cling and cuddle so confidingly in the slandang’s folds, seem of finer mold, and their deep, dark Hindu eyes tell of a different strain in the Malay blood than we had seen on the coast—these the Javanese, as distinguished from the Sundanese. The clumsy buffalo, or water-ox, is everywhere, plowing the fields, wallowing in mud, or browsing the stubble patch after the gleaners, always with a patient, statuesque, nude little brown boy on his blue-gray back, the fine, polished skins of these small herders glowing in the sun as if they were inanimate bronze figurines.

The train climbs very slowly from Bandong to Kalaidon Pass, and, after toiling with double engines up the steep grades, it rests at a level, and there bursts upon one the view of the plain of Leles—the fairest of all tropical landscapes, a vision of an ideal promised land, and such a dream of beauty that even the leaden blue clouds of a rainy afternoon could not dim its surpassing loveliness. The railway follows a long shelf hewn high on the mountain wall, that encircles an oval plain set with two conical mountains that rise more than two thousand feet above the level of this plain of Leles, itself two thousand feet above the level of the sea. The finely wrought surface of the plain—networked with the living green dikes and terraces of rice-fields, which, flooded, gleam and glitter in the fitful sun-rays, or, sown and harvested, glow with a mosaic of green and gold—is one exquisite symphony in color, an arrangement in greens that holds one breathless with delight. All the golden greens of rice seed-beds, the intense, vivid greens of young rice transplanted, the opaque and darker greens of advanced crops, and the rich tones of stubble are relieved by the clumps and masses of palms and fine-leaved trees, which, like islands or mere ornamental bits of shrubbery, are disposed with the most admirable effect to be attained by landscape art. Each of these tufted clumps of trees, foregrounded with broad, translucent banana-leaves, declares the presence of toy villages, where the tillers of the plain, the landscape-farmers, and the artist-artisans have woven and set up their pretty basketry homes. A masterpiece, a central ornament or jewel, to which the valley is but the fretted and appropriate setting, a very altar of agriculture, a colossal symbol and emblem of abundance, is the conical Goenong-Kalaidon, a mountain which rises three thousand feet from the level of the plain, and is terraced all the way from base to summit with narrow ribbons of rice-fields—the whole mountain mass etched with myriad fine green lines of verdure, wrinkled around and around with the curving parapets and tiny terraces that retain the flooded hanging gardens. Beyond this amazing piece of agricultural sculpture stands Goenong-Haroeman, a more perfect pyramid, a still rarer trophy of the landscape-farmer’s art, even more finely carved in the living green lines of ancient terrace-culture. The rush of the thousand rills, dropping from one tiny terrace to another, fills the air with a peculiar singing undertone, an eerie accompaniment that adds the last magic touch to the fascination of the plain of Leles. Hardly the miles of sculptured bas-reliefs on Boro Boedor and Brambanam temple walls make them any more impressive as monuments and records of human toil than these great green pyramids of Kalaidon and Haroeman, on which human labor has been lavished for all the seasons of uncounted generations—the ascending lines, the successive steps of the great green staircases of rice-terraces, recording ages of toil as plainly as the rings within a tree-trunk declare its successive years of growth.

The railway, dipping nearly to the level of the plain as it describes a great curve around the gloriously green Kalaidon, again ascends along the side of the mountain wall, loops itself around the Haroeman pyramid, and halts at the station of Leles. From that point one has a backward view over the enchanting picture (a line of white bridges and culverts marking the path of the railway along the mountain-side) and he looks directly across at the soft green slopes of Haroeman, which faces him—that vast green dome or pyramid, which is a little world in itself, with uncounted villages nestling under clumps of palm-trees that break the lines of singing terraces, and those peasants of the hanging gardens looking down upon the most pleasing prospect, the most beautiful landscape in all Java, which should be world-famous, and whose charm it is as impossible to exaggerate as to describe.

The sesquipedalian names of the railway-stations throughout the Preanger regencies, are something to fill a traveler’s mind between halts, and almost explain why the locomotives not only toot and whistle nearly all the time they are in motion, but stand on the track before station sign-boards and shriek for minutes at a time, like machines demented. Radjamendala is an easy arrangement in station names for the early hours of the trip, and all that family of names—Tjitjoeroek, Tjibeber, Tjirandjang, Tjipenjeum, Tjitjalenka, and also Tagoogapoe—will slip from the tongue after a few trials; but when one strains his eyes toward the limits of the plain of Leles, he may almost see the houses of Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan. People actually live there and pay taxes, and it is my one regret that I did not leave the train, drive over, and have some letters postmarked with that astonishing aggregation of sound-symbols. Only actual sight, too, could altogether convince one, that one small village of metal-workers could really support so much nomenclature together with any amount of profitable trade. In the intervals of practising the pronunciation of that particular geographic name, the artisans of Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan do hammer out serviceable gongs, bowls, and household utensils of brass and copper. In earlier times Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan was the Toledo of the isles, and the kris-blades forged there had finer edge than those from any other place in the archipelago. In these railroad and tramp-steamer days of universal, wholesale trade rivalry, the blade of the noble kris more often comes from abroad, and the chilled edges from Birmingham or those made in Germany have displaced the blades made at the edge of the plain of Leles, and the glory of Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan has departed.

XIII
“TO TISSAK MALAYA!”

The sun fell at six o’clock, and in the fast-gathering twilight of the tropics the train shrieked past Tjihondje and Radjapolah, stopped but a minute at Indihiang, and panted into Tissak Malaya like an affrighted creature, to put up for the night. We were whirled through avenues of pitch-darkness, with illuminated porticos gleaming through splendid shrubberies, to the passagrahan, or government rest-house. At first we thought the Parthenon had been restored and whitened, and leased to some colonial landlord, or at least that we had come to the deserted summer palace of some great sovereign, so lofty were the columns, so enormous the shining white portico before which the sadoes halted. Quite feudal and noble we felt ourselves, too, when the sadoe-drivers crouched on their heels in that abject position of the dodok, or squatting obeisance, and when they raised the coins to their foreheads in a reverent simbah, or worshipful thanksgiving. Truly we were reaching the heart of a strange country, and experiences were thickening!

The passagrahan was an object for sight-seers by itself. The great open space under the portico was the usual living-room, with huge tables, reading-lamps, and lounging- and arm-chairs fitted for a giant’s ease. A grand hallway running straight through the center of the building held the scattered and massive furniture of a banquet-hall. Bedrooms with latticed doors opened from either side of this noble hall, the least of these chambers twenty feet square, with ceilings twenty feet high; while the beds, measuring seven by nine feet, suggested Brobdingnagian nightmares to match.

At nine o’clock we followed a silent, beckoning Malay with a lantern off into pitch-darkness, down a deserted street, around a hedge, to a smaller white portico with lamps and rocking-chairs and center-tables. We were dazed as we came suddenly into the glare of lights; and the other guests at the table d’hôte of the little hotel viewed us as they would have viewed sudden arrivals by balloon.

“From America! To Tissak Malaya!” they all exclaimed, and we almost apologized for having come so far. There was an amiable and charming young Dutch woman in the company, who, speaking English, benefited all her compatriots with the details of our present itinerary, our past lives and mutual relationships, after each little conversational turn she took with us.

Having commanded a sunrise breakfast for the next morning, we followed the lantern and the silent Malay back through blackness to our illuminated Parthenon of a passagrahan, and had entomological excitement and entertainment for an hour, while all the strange flying things filled the air and strewed the table beneath the lamps. The usual lizards chuck-chucked and called for “Becky” in the shadows, and thin wraiths of lizards ran over the great columns and walls; but a house-front that was not decorated with lizards would be the strangest night sight in Java. When we had laid ourselves out on the state catafalques in the great bedrooms, stealthy whisperings and rustlings of palm-trees beyond the latticed windows, other strange sounds, and startled bird-calls throughout the night suggested the great snakes we had expected to encounter daily and nightly in Java. The tiny light floating in a tumbler of cocoanut-oil threw weird shadows over the walls, and within the bed-curtains one had space to dance a quadrille or arrange a whole set of ordinary bedroom furniture, while the open construction of the upper partition-walls let one converse at will with the occupant of the farthest apartment.

A MOHAMMEDAN MOSQUE.